Trick Mirror

My 8 highlights

• She ushered me into a cave-dark room full of sinewy women gathering mysterious red rubber props. The front wall was mirrored. The women stared at their reflections, stone-faced, preparing. Then class started, and it was an immediate state of emergency. Barre is a manic and ritualized activity, often set to deafening music and lighting changes; that day, I felt like a police car was doing donuts in my frontal cortex for fifty-five minutes straight.

• today we mostly consume news that corresponds with our ideological alignment, which has been fine-tuned to make us feel self-righteous and also mad.

• work is rebranded as pleasure so that we will accept more of it—a time when, for women, improving your looks is a job that you’re supposed to believe is fun.

• the election of Donald Trump, an incontrovertible, humiliating vindication of scamming as the quintessential American ethos.

• the rise of companies like Uber and Amazon, which broke apart the economy and then sold it a cheap ride to the duct tape store, all while promising to make the world a better and more convenient place.

• instead of being counseled by mid-century magazines to spend time and money trying to be more radiant for our husbands, we can now counsel one another to do all the same things but for ourselves.

• How embarrassing, I thought, to openly crave attention. Why couldn’t she figure out that you were supposed to pretend you didn’t care?

• In the hundred-degree heat I would lie back for corpse pose, sweat soaking my cheap mat from Target, and sometimes, as I fluttered my eyes shut, I would catch the twinkle of enormous diamond rings caught in shafts of sunbeam, blinking at me in the temporary darkness like a fleet of indoor stars.