This week I went with my editor to the Whiting Awards at the Morgan. She was invited, not me. I don’t win awards. I don’t even get nominated for awards. Who gives a crap about awards? I don’t need the validation of my literary peers. People “like” my status updates on the reg. Strangers retweet me all the time. That’s all the validation I need. You just get a stupid certificate or something, right? Unless it’s the Whiting Award and then you get FIFTY FUCKING THOUSAND DOLLARS.
OK, I want an award.
Anyway, a couple of people who are super nice won so I was happy to see them all dressed up and fancy and happy. Said Sayrafiezadeh, that dude’s the nicest. Also Michael Dahlie is a sweetheart. And my agent was there because he works with Michael. And Summer, my old publicist now turned friend, was there. And I saw Meg Wolitzer from afar, and we made nice smiles at each other. It made me really happy. All these people I like and respect in one place, completely by accident. I always feel like I have to plan things so much, especially lately. It was delightful to have something just happen.
After that I walked Summer to the C train, gab gab gabbing away, and then took a cab to Renata’s birthday party at some restaurant on at 11th Ave and 22nd Street which, on the one hand, I couldn’t believe I was going that far away from everything (whatever “everything” is), but on the other hand I trusted that Renata would not have asked us to make that journey unless it was going to be fun. That’s right. Trust.
And it was! There were ipad DJs and drag queens and men in business suits and software programmers and Julie Klausner and Jack Fagan and young blogger Tyler Coates, fresh off the boat, and I believe I met two separate people who ran their own queer film series, and men with mustaches, and there was this weird-ass mansion/doll house like backdrop to the place, and basically it felt like 1998 up in there in the best possible way, minus the coke of course, and maybe there WAS coke there, sure, why not, but it just wasn’t in a tiny plastic bag in MY pocket, waiting to be furtively consumed in the bathroom in a pathetic attempt at some kind of relevance, cultural or social or personal or whatfuckingever.
Later I took a cab with Julie and Jack downtown and we talked a little bit about completely ridiculous things that had happened on the internet in the past few days that were so annoying that they ultimately had just become amusing. Good lord those two are funny. And Klausner’s such a bad ass, she really is. And then somehow I made it home, and I moved my car to the right side of the street, and then I woke up the next morning and I don’t even know how this happened exactly but I am now working at home instead of in the office, which is the best birthday present over. Just to not have to haul my laptop a mile to the subway every morning and crush myself into the crowd of people on the overtaxed L train is reason enough to celebrate.
