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Maskerade

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I’ve barely noticed the lockdown, so busy have I been sublimating any anxiety into frenzied and probably pointless activity. In the past month, I’ve made 250-odd (and I do mean odd) fabric masks. Initially they were commissioned by medical personnel to protect and prolong the use of N95 masks, and later they were requested by everyone from Native American groups to food banks to homeless shelters. No one knows whether cloth masks shield the breather or the breathed-upon from COVID-19, but nearly everyone is required to wear one now. The utility of the masks I make, in particular, cannot be known since I work on donated fabrics—different ones on different days, none bearing any mystery as to why they were donated. The conundrum of the masks is that the more impervious they are, the more impervious they are. In other words, a mask that allows you to breathe is not preventing disease transmission. I know more than the average person now about masks, and that means I know nothing, sinc...
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Teaching moments

Teaching moments A while back, I was sitting in the San Jose airport in Costa Rica, waiting for the van that was supposed to take me to a yoga retreat a couple hours away. The van was very, very late, and a woman about my age introduced herself as a sister yogini (let’s call her 3G), and we started chatting. I was tempted to complain as the hours ticked by, but my companion stopped me cold by musing, “I wonder what it is that I need to learn from waiting?” So the other day when I walking in the park sweating inside my mask, I asked myself 3G’s question: What is it I can learn from this fucking mask? And there are a few things: First, I now know how enraging it must be to women wearing burqas to be asked, Isn’t that thing hot? And I know the answer too: It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity. Second, why am I still peering into magnifying mirrors to scissor off my chin whiskers? No one can see me behind the white curtain that covers my face and stifles my breath. Third, I am so ...
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Like Downton Abbey but different

The appeal of Downton Abbey for most Americans is its quaintness—nostalgia for a bygone world. But for a certain class of New Yorkers, Downton Abbey is aspirational. Perhaps we don't long for footmen and butlers and maids and valets. But doormen and supers? Hell, yes. After living for 35 years in a little bohemian self-managed building, Other and I had finally had enough of flushing boilers and fixing water heaters and shoveling sidewalks and picking up litter. A couple months ago, we left our old Bowery neighborhood and moved to the Upper West Side, where rain is just weather and not a gutter crisis. We expected to have buyer's remorse, known hereabouts as the New York surprise—the discovery that whatever due diligence you did was inadequate and your building turns out to be infested with bed bugs or roaches or black mold or totally insane neighbors or ...  In any case, it hasn't happened—so far. We've seen no vermin. And the neighbors seem sane. There's a ...
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