LIVED THROUGH THIS

When you turn 50, if you’re normal and not pathologically overly positive, you fall into a depression. Regrets hit harder; the knee you busted trying to impress a boyfriend 20 years ago hurts more; and you start obsessively checking your retirement account and panicking.

But there are benefits too, mostly of the I-don’t-give-a-fuck variety. Dramatic friends no longer keep you up at night, you have no shame in declining plans, and because you’re entering that invisible stage society reserves for women who can no longer reproduce, no one comments on your looks anymore.

Or so I thought. Hello, my name…

My crush is twenty-five years old. Not the man himself. He’s fifty-one, born in 1970 like me, and I’ve thought about him for at least a quarter of a century by now. We will never get together, but my desire never goes away. This might be the definition of Purgatory.

Long before I met this guy — let’s call him Rigatoni, because why not? — I spent a year in Florence, wandering through churches, staring at frescoes. I smelled the cool plaster walls, tattooed with paint. For a gal who grew up in California, raised by sunlight, dust and mini-malls…

You need to rest your eyeballs. I learned this twenty years ago when I traveled to Iceland, and all I saw was green (the ground) and blue (the sky). Sometimes the ground was white (snow) or brown, but that was the only variation. I spent weeks seeing only two colors, and was surprised to find that my eyes started to…soften. My actual eyeballs, which had been clenched into some sort of eyeball fist after living in New York City, stretched out, turned off their phone, and ordered room service.

We see too much. I have no science to back this…

Greetings! We are back here at Sybarite. And by “we” I mean me, Adeline Dimond, the only editor so far of this nascent publication. But I’m using the royal “we” to make is seem like there is a lot of power behind this thing. Manifesting, if you will. Because we/I need writers, and I/we need help running this thing. Fake it till you make it.

What is a Sybarite, you may be wondering? It’s a person devoted to luxury and pleasure. You can read about the idea for this publication here, and the Sybarites here, but if that’s too much…

I’m not going to tell you another COVID story (enough already) other than to tell you that my Dad has it.

But I am going to tell you about all the people who told me, in one way or another, that it’s our fault. Our family did it all wrong. And now we feel embarrassed, ashamed.

There was the nurse who works for my Dad’s neurologist: she told me that I should never have put him in assisted living — never mind that his Parkinson’s disease was making him fall in the shower, and we didn’t want to see his…

My life doesn’t look like it’s supposed to, and I’m being very literal: it’s visually wrong. My eyes are supposed to be seeing other things.

Here’s how it was supposed to look: after college, I would live in a New York downtown loft with paint-splattered cement floors and industrial pipes transversing the ceiling. There would be melted candle wax and incense ashes and dinner parties that consisted of one large bowl of pasta everyone would pass around.

There was a man I was sharing this all with, but he was only vaguely outlined: an artist of some kind, with worn-in…

(Note: we started writing this before the horrifying, seemingly never-ending examples of law enforcement’s brutalization of the black community. That issue is too serious for this piece, or even this publication, but we wanted people to know that the information we offer below is no way is making light of this issue by not including it. #BlackLivesMatter).

We’re polytheists here at Sybarite and worship several gods and goddesses, but our most beloved and powerful deity is Julia Child. We conduct our lives based on her teachings, and often ask ourselves “What would Julia Do?” or when we’re pressed for time…

I’ll graph that sentence later.

I’m embarrassed to admit it, given my loud condemnation of dating apps, but I’m back on the dating apps. But it’s not my fault. Someone ghosted me who I was delusionally certain was not in fact ghosting me, and so I had to go back on to prove that I was moving on. Taking a stand, if you will.

And then End Times rolled around and I thought, f*ck it, I’ll continue messaging with these random men while I try to find to find my next Netflix binge. Some of the conversations have been surprisingly…