Fever to Tell

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Last night, I was home before midnight, after eating a sushi dinner with old friends.

One of whom is Michaela Mckee, who I hadn’t seen since the seventh grade, when she went by Mickey Mckee. I will always refer to her as Mickey Mickee because it’s simply too good of a name to drop.

Michaela has been living in New York for about four years and ten months longer than I have and you can tell. She knows of all the great hole-in-the-wall restaurants, she probably never gets lost, and she has a job that she loves. (Film producer.) She even knows how to hold her chopsticks just so, which may not necessarily be an attribute that is site specific to New York.

“How did you get past this?” I asked her.

What?

“This phase where you feel the need to go out every night, for fear of missing something.”

“Oh,” she said wisely, “you’ll get over it. Trust me.”

I’ll take her word for it but at the moment, I cannot recall a single night this summer where I caught eight hours of sleep in a row. And I’ve found that it’s taken me over two weeks to read a book that would normally take me only a few days.

It’s hard work, this flaneur business. To be a granddaughter of Baudelaire, you must know when to conserve your energy, which I haven’t quite mastered as of now.

Anyway, I ate these Cheetos today -- the puffed kind, even. Out of all the terrible things I do and do not do to my body, somehow eating Cheetos seems like the worst of it.