Tseng Chien-Ying, Singularity, 2026

I don’t consider myself a competitive person but I remember that shortly after giving birth to federica, I wished I could do it again because now that I knew what it was I could “do it” “better.” The gag is of course that the experience can never be recreated. I am three(?) weeks away from giving birth again but it’ll still be a first time. Preparing for the event taking into consideration what happened last time is no different than preparing for the event taking into consideration what books say can happen, what friends told me their own experience was like. I’m a different person now, I’m older (welcome to your geriatric pregnancy!), I’m more tired, I was not good at taking my pre-natal vitamins every day, and I did not do weekly Pilates throughout; but on the flip side the fact that we’re post-pandemie and we’re not quarantined anymore means I’ve been active member of society out in the world. Surely that’s worth something.

Obviously I’ve already broken what I assume to be the first rule of having more than one child—you’re not supposed to compare them. But I’m not, I’m merely looking at the different sets of circumstances as a way to make sense of the ways my life is going to change (“looking for a strand to climb” like Fiona would say but I’m not in need of hope… just reassurance?) I have half-siblings but I grew up an only child. Growing up I never dreamed of becoming a mother—not because I was against it, but I guess I saw it as a given and not something to waste a dream on, I had other uses for those. (I know now it’s not actually a given, but that’s the thing about being a young person looking at the world I guess.) I figured if I ever had children I would have just one because that’s all I knew. But now there’s gonna be two and I have no concept of what that’s like. The cringe confession is I can’t imagine how my heart can give and sustain double the love it’s been holding now even tho I know it’s going to work it out somehow. In the meantime I tell Federica I love her more than everything in the world while the statement is 100% true and requires no asterisks.

Usually by this time of the year I have made a playlist for the summer (I like to use playlists as markers of time), but I think I have been too laden with anxiety to pinpoint a mood and build a puzzle around it. It is also another thing I have felt guilty about: when I was pregnant with Federica I made a playlist of songs for her. A few weeks ago I had the thought that all problems would be solved if gang gang dance got back together and played a few shows. And it was a little like a lightbulb moment.

I did mushrooms once, on new years a long time ago. At the time I was living in a small one bedroom apartment on the top floor of one of those classic Brooklyn homes. I have a memory of being able to see a little bit of the Gowanus canal from my back windows but now am not sure if I’m conflating it with the view from a different apartment in my past. Sitting in the living room before the clock struck midnight, my best friend, my then-boyfriend, and I all ate some. I queued up Gang Gang Dance’s Saint Dymphna, and then sat around talking waiting to see what would happen while thinking that nothing would actually happen. Our living room had hardwood floors, stained an ugly shade of yellow visually sticky with resin from a haphazard application god knows how long so; but they were wood regardless. Suddenly I discovered that if I put my hands flat in front of me and slowly raised them from the ground, I could make all manner of grass and flowers suddenly bloom from the hardwood. Only god knows how much time I spent engaging in this spiritual gardening practice. Though now I understand that mushrooms do in fact seek to connect us to Mother Nature, I also felt that it was the Gang Gang Dance of it all that facilitated the connection, because what is their music if not a conduit for other dimensions?

My college boyfriend (a different one from the one I had the psychedelic experience described above) spent a lot of time on whatever kind of musical forums existed in the early aughts (maybe it was Discogs?). I don’t remember the first time I listened to Gang Gang Dance, but I know the first song of theirs that I became absolutely obsessed with was “Rugs of Prayer,” which was featured in an insane compilation called They Keep Me Smiling, put out by United Bamboo, one of those uniquely New York downtown independent fashion labels. It’s a haunting song with sparse beats that sounds like steps echoing down the hall and twinkling pianos heard in the distance when you think you’re supposed to be alone, Lizzi Bougatsos’s voice doubled or tripled onto herself as a haunting, and then the reach a crescendo when the ghosts maybe catch you and then you’re free from the fear and a groove emerges. I listened to it on repeat and would blast it during parties by the time everyone was good and wasted (I was a fun gal!). Every single time I’ve seen them live has been life-changing and life-renewing.

There’s still no playlist because I won’t need it this time, the vibe is simply their 2011 record Eye Contact. In any case, there will not be music playing while I give birth (it does not seem realistic to me), but every day on the train, I press play on “Glass Jar” and the voice says “I can hear everything / it’s everything time” and I imagine myself channeling that energy when it’s time to begin breathing, inhaling in all the cosmic sounds as it gets time to begin to push and the voice says “don’t worry,” and then when the melody starts in and the world opens up in the song that’s when the world will also open up in me, and the drums say it’s time to fucking push and I will push and this baby will be born to the most impeccable vibes known to mankind. And I don’t know what Lizzi is singing and I’ll never even look it up, but I think she says “I care for you like a mother” and that’s good enough for me.

After I finished this I remembered that Lizzi was one of the first-ever (or was she thee first-ever?) interviews I did—for Rookie!— and luckily it’s still online and not as embarrassing as I would remember it but also maybe the more things change the more they stay the same?

I found out I was pregnant in October or November. Once that happens your future is immediately transformed, segmented into weeks. I thought about this thing I wrote a month after Federica was born.

The joke was that “time is a flat circle” and for a time it was a joke.
There are a few times I’ve been aware of “time.” Once was when I was twenty seven.
I thought “wow you are almost thirty.”
I thought “what are you doing with your life.”

Later I realized that it was just my return of saturn and maybe a return of saturn just means waking up to the awareness that time is finite. But that was a brief spell and after I had course-corrected life to account for Time, it shifted back into the background like the constant almost imperceptible hum of the city rather than the constant loud clanging of church bells.

That was then, and now things are different. Every day I am counting something in my head, keeping track of things in an app, remembering new numbers with new meanings.

It started naively enough, with pandemic tracking time. Week one, week two, week three, month four, month five. I gave this count up a long time ago, but a friend who has been keeping track of the days on Instagram tells me today is day 705. There was a brief window of counting pregnancy time, followed by the seemingly eternal, hollow of counting un-pregnancy time, every week closer or further away from a goal or another. Then the counting of “we’re trying.” One day, two days, three days that are good, one week, maybe another. Then one week and another week and another, have there been enough days yet to take a test? Start the count all over again.

Pregnancy time is counting forwards and backwards. Counting to ten weeks until “it’s safe.” Every four weeks a doctor appointment. Counting the weeks until baby begins to move. Counting up to when baby is fully formed. Every two weeks a doctor appointment. Counting up to when it’s safe for baby to be born. Every week a doctor appointment. Counting down the weeks for baby to be born. Counting down the days for baby to be born. Counting the minutes between contractions. Are you ready to push? Three pushes, ten seconds each, during a contraction. Ten, Nine, Eight, Seven Six, Five, Four, Three, Two, One, Ten, Nine, Eight, Seven Six, Five, Four, Three, Two, One, Ten, Nine, Eight, Seven Six, Five, Four, Three, Two, One, Ten, Nine, Eight, Seven Six, Five, Four, Three, Two, One. I am suspended in time thinking about pushing, waiting for the next time to push. Three more pushes and then she’s out! Two more pushes and then she’s out! One more push and then she’s out! And then she’s out and time really does stand still. I see her little long legs flying through the air. I hear her cry. I hold her.

A pause in the count.

But that was just a timer reset, and I know that. She is one day old, she is two days old. She is one week old. She is one month old. I feed her. I count how many minutes she stays at my breast. When she is done, I attempt to go about my life. I count how many minutes are left until I have to feed her again. It is recommended that newborns eat every two to three hours with one four hour stretch, ideally during the night, to allow for some extra rest. But now she is five weeks old and the doctor says we can go five hours, if she lets us. There are 24 hours in a day but I live inside windows of two or three or four hours. I know it won’t be like this forever. When this count is over a new one will take its place. I think about buying myself a weekly flower delivery subscription. A more beautiful way to mark the time. I imagine myself in the future thinking back about week six with the Anthuriums, week nine with the mimosas, week 13 with the poppies. And yet I do not despair, I do not feel bleak, I have found the beauty in the numbers.

Everything is different now though.

The last time I wrote here, which was five months ago, it was about wanting everything and ignoring pauses. A fucked-up thing to write about (manifest?) in hindsight because this whole time I’ve felt like I am being pushed forward without a place to stop and rest for a minute. The countdown to ten weeks was as stressful as ever but after that it was off to the races as ever. I tried to take some time off during the holidays but I got sick so there was no rest, only the constant yearning for a time when “I felt normal.” I started a new job which is both more relaxed and more stressful because I need to exercise a new part of my brain. The other part of my brain is being taken up by the whole business of growing a human, and then the other part of my brain is being taken up by the whole business of raising a different human, and then the other part of my brain is being taken up by whatever things are solely mine and do not depend on or owe anything to anyone else but of course that’s the part I’ve been prioritizing the least. I have not read as many books as I would like, I find myself falling asleep after a few pages, so everything is moving fast and reading is moving slow. But there is just not enough time. To sleep and to work and to be a person, I find the time lacking. I try to start a list of all the things we’ll need for the new baby, but it gets overwhelming. I have time, I think. The baby spends the whole day kicking and moving and grooving inside my stomach. She doesn’t yet know about time! Fede is four and everything in the past is “yesterday” and everything in the future is “next year.” What do any of us know about time, really.

A song that goes and goes and goes and goes and then stops abruptly and then goes and goes and goes and in the video everything goes backwards the second time. Feels… relatable.

In the mornings Federica has her breakfast while watching music videos from The Strokes on the TV. I’m not entirely responsible for it. A year and a half ago I was scrolling on TikTok when a snippet of the “Hard to Explain” music video came on. I paused for a bit and then kept scrolling and Fede complained and asked me to go back but I instead I just pulled up the music video for her on my phone where I’d already been adding a few other videos that she liked to watch. She was hooked.

She’s since continued exploring the band’s repertoire on her own, adding to the list of songs that she loves. The last few months we’ve listened to “Heart in a Cage” on repeat, and although I am not sure she knows exactly what bad words are yet, she does take special relish in singing and repeating “fucking around.” When she listens to them she dances and plays air guitar and sometimes she straps on her little guitar and gets her microphone out. She calls them “The Stro-kees,” and Julian and “Nicky” are her favorites. She demands we listen to them every time we get in the car and also before bed.

Back in September 2001, I starting my first year of college in Philly and had thankfully already found the gang of music-obsessed kids to befriend. We’d heard about The Strokes as a thing people were talking about but we hadn’t seen them or heard their music. One day we were in the lounge in the basement of my dorm when we turned on MTV and caught what looked to be an old video of a band playing some sort of American Bandstand-ish show. My friend and I were totally enthralled, probably thinking, what is this and how come we’ve never seen it before? Then the little end credits came on and we saw it was The Strokes and well, that very same weekend we took the 32 bus down to South Street and went to Spaceboy and bought their cd. We listened to it on repeat, we were obsessed. We looked up the guitar tabs and learned a few of the songs.

A couple of years from now, when time feels even more elusive, I know there will come a time when I will listen to them and things will slow down… I will think about being pregnant with this baby and I will think about how it was one of Fede’s earliest obsessions, and then I will think about Philly and being 17 and my friends and my youth. And then it really will be like time is a flat circle and isn’t that something.

The name of the song is “True Life.” It starts with two dueling guitars competing for who can have the most serrated sound, like a knife cutting a knife challenging you to get the fuck up and move, which is evident when the drum beat starts keeping up the pace—are you running yet?—and then the bass line comes in the chorus like running horses chasing a steam locomotive but the steam locomotive is you and your legs are moving, running, before you even have a clue what’s going on. The instant I heard this song, Water From Your Eyes became a favorite band. I finally saw them live a few weeks ago and when they played this song I felt my entire body moving and convulsing my limbs losing control. It was even better live with their beast of a drummer locking into the exact kind of disco beat that can possess you. The energy they conjured was so intense that after, when they were playing a real slow jam, the kids started a mosh pit, like a delayed response. José and I always joke about “finding the pause,” the antidote to our love for commas and semi-colons and certainly em-dashes, but maybe now it’s time to give up the pause completely. I started reading Swann’s Way at the beginning of the year (this reminds me, I need to finish it), and of course the extraordinarily long sentences are so lush that sometimes I feel like I am a tourist sightseeing on a bus—Look at the size of that one! and Look at what he did with this one! I read Zoe Dubno’s Happiness and Love and was enthralled. It’s one long text, the narrator’s thoughts as she attends a dinner following the funeral of a friend (can it really be called a paragraph if it’s just the entire novel?). It was funny and familiar and I didn’t want to put it down and there was also not a single end of a sentence where it ever felt “like a good place to stop.” I didn’t read it in one sitting because, well, I’m a person who is alive with a kid, but it is exactly the kind of book that demands to just be read at once. In the afterword Dubno explains she “borrowed” the format/premise from Thomas Bernhard’s Woodcutters, and then when I was talking about the book with T she said she was also reading a book with a similar structure and it turned out that it was a different book by Bernhard called The Loser, so I read it right after. This one was a different reading experience, Bernhard does a lot of repetition of the same phrases over and over again and I could only read about twenty minutes at a time before I felt my eyes glazing over. But then there was a whole section where he recalled things a friend had said and every sentence ended with “he said, I thought,” which I loved, I thought. The end comes to a crescendo but I was lulled to a kind of numbness by the time I got there, I thought. It reminded me of the first time I watched Jeanne Dielman on my little laptop in my kitchen table, knowing not a single thing about it when I was lulled by the pace and then at the last scene was jolted and “wait, what?” and had to go back and re-watch. After me and T finished the book we read more about Bernhard and a lot of it made more sense. I want to read it again soon, when I am in a better state of mind (I don’t think this is a book to read on your phone, in short spurts, on the subway). I keep thinking once again, of Tracey Emin’s I’ve Got It All because everything is about abundance. (It’s funny how often I think of Emin’s work, unprompted, which is how I know that she’s really carved a path into my brain). I still think of this as the year (the life?) of jamming econo and it seems to go against the desire for all of the sounds and all of the words and a constant movement forward and a desire for desire itself but it also isn’t really at all because it’s about making and following a curiosity following all curiosities. When it rains it pours, they say, but you can make your own déluge anytime you want, I know.

Tracey Emin, I’ve Got It All, 2000

September was brutal as it always. When it was all over I went to movement class. “I need to feel grounded and come back to my body,” I offered at the beginning, after suffering through two weeks of brain fog where I was wringing my brain, extruding words and then desperately searching for better words to say what I needed to say. In class someone else said they were looking to “surf the wave,” and I could tell a few of us decided then and there we wanted to do it too. I got there. At some point during class, the music had a rounded sound, and my body fell in a groove like a loop, standing, kneeling, arching my body forward, planting my hands on the ground and sweeping them around. I thought “Oh I am really surfing the wave!” and it was funny.

Raymond Pettibon, No Title (Some things at sea), 2010, Gouache on paper, 41 x 36 inches

I was still thinking about it on the train home after class and suddenly thought about Raymond Pettibon’s surfer paintings. I don’t remember ever seeing them IRL and was surprised at how clear they appeared in my head. A few days later I went and bought Point Break which gathers all of his surfer paintings. Reading the opening essay, I quickly learn that there is no sea in the Christian heaven. (Can you imagine such a thing? An eternal paradise without an ocean?) It’s fine I guess, we aren’t going to that Christian heaven anyway, and who needs it when you have Pettibon’s expressive waves, lines swishing and crashing, blues and blues and more blues and sometimes yellow and sometimes black but definitely white that you can get lost in just as easily as if they were real waves, but not in a way that could ever replace the real feeling. I’ve been obsessed with pictures of waves before, at the height of one depression or other, collecting them when I couldn’t find the words for emotions. I’ve never surfed, but I understand the appeal, the giving yourself completely to your surroundings, ceding control in order to be on top just for a few seconds, and then you are back where you started but you aren’t the same person that you were when you started. Waves continuously crash ashore but they aren’t the same waves and the shore doesn’t remain the same either. In that essay, the writer quotes a German philosopher that describes the sea as “a naturally given boundary of the realm of human activities,” and “the sphere of the unreckonable and lawless.” These things are of course the point of painting, of writing, of music, of all creative pursuits; to transcend the realm of human activities, and muck about in the sphere of the unreckonable and lawless! To SWIM!

Geese in Greenpoint

I saw Geese play this weekend. Their new record Getting Killed is chaotic and beautiful and weird and I have been listening to it on repeat. It was a free show in what turned out to be the middle of a street in Greenpoint. We got there early, found a spot right in front and then took in the scene. The average age of attendees show was probably… 23, (it’s how old the members of the band are too). Amy Rose and I agreed the vibe felt very Rookie.

They did not set up an elevated stage, just put up a few barricades to separate the area where they would be playing from the audience. We couldn’t see them when they started playing but the sound was stupid phenomenal. As the crowd started moving to the music and their heads started bobbing, we realized we were very close to them, maybe ten heads in, and could see lead singer Cameron Winter if we angled our heads right, but for most of the show it was just a sea of people. His voice is just as velvety as you hope it will be. Tran calls it the voice of god (the voice of a god?) and I don’t think she’s wrong. (Afterwards a friend texted, “I was deeply unconcerned about not seeing because it sounded so good,” which is another version of “blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”) The afternoon had the kind of electricity that comes with witnessing once-in-a-lifetime events. I felt grateful to be there but also to be there with friends; it felt hopeful to be surrounded by so many kids completely enthralled by this band that belongs to them, that is them. Everyone sang along to “Taxes” yelling “DOCTOR! DOCTOR! HEAL YOURSELF.” I closed my eyes and looked up to the sky and felt myself getting cleansed of the muck energy stuck in my body. It all got sucked out of me like the someone struck me with a straw and drank through me. When they played “2122” from their previous record the kids totally lost their minds and I was sure they were going to mosh and I was going to have to get out of the way and let them have their fun, but that’s not really what happened. Everyone was just simply joyously pogo-ing in place. I jumped up and down too and let myself be carried back and forth and around like a wave.

Raymond Pettibon, No Title (Lived, loved, wasted…), 2001, Ink and watercolor on paper, 33 x 25 inches

I’ve been walking around carrying a low-simmering energy to and fro. A vat of soup. Bogged down by the realization that I am no longer waiting for, nor am I excited to receive signs from the world to do the things that I need to do, which in this case is write the things that I want to write, that I need to write. This is a good thing even though it’s a feeling of desperation, of utter frustration, at myself. The dread is a blanket, I am walking around in ooze, but the excuses are always so much easier to access: I am always so tired, the allure of sleep so powerful. I’m never going to get the time. I need to dig for the time, carve out the time, take it in small hits wherever I can find it. Push past other seductions, fantasies, and all other manners of I only had X then I could do Y wishful thinking.

I think of the Annie Lennox song where she sings “No more I love you’s/ The language is leaving me/ No more I love you’s/ Changes are shifting outside the word” except I don’t think the language is leaving me but rather filling in me, piling the fuck up, fighting to be let out. I always thought she sang “changes are shifting outside the world” but now I see the “word” is indeed truer. The final boss of creative anxiety is just yourself with no lives left.

I have been reading a lot, which is the warm-up for writing. The stretching. I had been meaning to read Nadja because of Selin in Either/Or and then someone left a copy on the giveaway table at work. A few pages in I realized that randomly finding the book was the best way to read this book. But I don’t have any other meaning to assign to this. It’s just a thing that happened.

Here are other things that have happened: waiting for the D train, a group of school-aged boys on the platform. As the train enters the station they all hold their arms up and start pulling an imaginary horn, like it was a passing truck. When the conductor finally gets close to them he quickly honks the horn on the train and the boys absolutely lose their minds with joy. A woman sits down next to me on the R train, pulls out a compact mirror and starts doing her makeup. As she applies blush on her cheeks the woman sitting on her other side says “oh that’s so nice!” The woman is caught off-guard, says thank you. On a different R train, a woman huffs and puffs her way down the middle of the train: she’s young, in workout clothes, carrying a dark cloud of energy around her that makes everyone look up to see what’s going on, as she goes to open the door to cross trains, the man leaning on the door reading a book starts moving out of his way but she doesn’t wait, pushes him off to get through. He yells at her, she yells back at him. It was a quick and unnecessary violence, and I wondered if when she got home later that night she thought about and regretted her actions. I go back to reading my book, and look up a few stops later to see he is making conversation with a woman sitting on one of the seats directly next to the door, no doubt about the event that just took place. Even later on, as the man finally reaches his stop and starts to gather his things, they say goodbye, as if they are friends. Looking with tenderness at everyone riding the train is a new trait that surprises me.

The new Lorde has been a heavy topic of conversation in many group chats. I didn’t love the singles, and the promotion felt like she was trying too hard to prove she is cool and different, (though I say this with love because everyone tries too hard to be cool and different, they just hope you can’t see the hardcore paddling under the surface), but then the songs feel the opposite, unstudied and raw, like the writing you do for yourself and would “clean up” before letting other people see it. I cringe a little when she sings about getting pierced on Canal and making a wish when the needle goes in, but then a friend tells me “that’s so you.” She’s probably right even though I really am just “a grown woman in a baby tee.” I think a lot of this is cringe. But I’m stet.

[An actual P.S.: This has been sitting in my drafts for a month, I guess I had second-guessed my ability to be comfortable with my own cringe, but I really am stet! I’m stet!!! I continue to insist as I slowly shink and transform into a corn cob.]