1/9/25: This day is a wash. I feel almost normal, except my stomach feels tender (worst word) and bruised. I work from home and experience a few setbacks on a project I’ve been working on. My eyes feel dry, red, and swollen. I do the shots alone without much fanfare. I watch the tutorial videos again but am surprised at how quickly I know the drill. The amounts are the same tonight: 150 Gonal-F, 75 Menopur. Menopur is quickly becoming my enemy because this one hurts. I don’t talk to anyone IRL or leave my apartment.


1/10/25: Friday. I go into the office so I can focus. It’s just me and Brian for the first couple of hours. He asks me how I am, and I find myself talking for 20 minutes, monologue-style, about my existential spiral about having kids. He acknowledges he hasn’t really had to consider the question much (he’s 26,) but he’s comforting, still. Rachel and I order Cafe Himalaya for lunch, and she helps me rework a pitch. Her edits are smart and funny, and it’s cool to see how good she is at the job in action.
I commit to too many plans after work, and the imposed limitations of having to be home between 7-10 to do my injections become apparent. I think about how restricted actual moms, beholden to the bodily and emotional needs of a small human being, must feel. I stop by the opening at James Cohan Gallery, Behind the Bedroom Door, a group exhibition that “explores the private realms where intimacy and solitude share space with the inner life of dreams and fantasies.” It was bustling. Jane Cohan, May’s mom, curated the show, which includes works from Diane Arbus, Sophie Calle, Yinka Shonibare, and Lisa Yuskavage, among many others. I want to spend more time taking it in, but I keep checking the time on my phone so I can rush back to Brooklyn to do my injections before an 8 PM reservation at Daphne’s.
I zoom back on the A train, feed my cats, and quickly do my shots behind my bedroom door before walking to meet Laur at the restaurant. My body feels like a shaken-up seltzer. Laur tells me about how her new coworker shared his screen the other day, and his Chat GPT was up. He had typed: “How many calories in a salad?” We laugh about how vague the term “salad” is.
1/11/25: Back in Times Square before 9 AM. Ultrasound appointment to check that the medication is prompting my follicles to grow. All good there, and I’m in and out quick. I kill time in the Sephora in Times Square before heading to Cosmic Diner, where May, Laura, and Maggie are going to meet me at 10:30.


After the diner, we head to MoMA and put our names on the queue to see Christian Marclay’s The Clock, “a 24-hour montage composed from thousands of film and television clips depicting clocks and other references to time.” We wander the exhibits until I get the automated text that it’s our time. It’s 1:24 PM.
We sink into the plush seats and watch for about an hour — the exact timing, it turns out, that Zadie Smith writes about in her 2011 NYRB Review of the work, “Killing Orson Welles at Midnight.”
"There’s no slowing it down and no turning back: the day is too far along to be denied. Though some will try, some always do. At two o’clock precisely a man screams at a grandfather clock (“That’ll be enough of that!”) and smashes it to pieces. But the day continues. It always does. The Japanese—a pragmatic people, a realistic people—deal with the situation by having a meeting at a long white conference table. Faced with the same reality, we in the West tend to opt for a stiff drink instead. But people will insist upon shooting us sideways glances and saying things like “It’s two o’clock in the afternoon!” and so we put down our glasses and sigh. The afternoon—free from the blur of hangover or the fug of sleep—is when our shared predicament on this planet becomes clear."
Behind me, a baby coos, “Ah, ah, ah.” Her mom shushes her, soothing. The elderly woman next to me keeps nodding off, her head lolling back, mouth open, white short hair like a dandelion. Time is happening in the room while onscreen: Glenn Close pinches the skin on her wrist, fretting about its give, Tobey Maguire delivers a stack of Joe’s pizzas (late), and Robert De Niro notices blood on his watch. It’s almost too on-the-nose to be in this room, watching TV and Movie characters across film history fuck, sleep, eat, run, and die as the clock steadily marches forward. Tick, tick, tick. All human activity organized by and against a device. By freezing my eggs, I’m essentially trying to outsmart The Clock, time itself, and its effects on my body.
My mom has been digitizing our home videos. In one I recently watched, I’m probably 9 or 10 years old, and I’m sitting with a sick baby Coco in the kitchen, eating chocolate ice cream while my mom asks me questions like, “If you could rename yourself, what would you name yourself?” (Answer: Ella or Jenny). A few minutes into the recording, she asks: “What do you think you’re going to be doing when you’re my age?” “How should I know?” I respond incredulously, consider, and then say: “Cleaning up!”


This is beautiful
“Cleaning up”… wise child and woman