Dear Auntie NYC, My CE score turned orange three weeks ago and I have no idea why. I haven’t been to a protest. I did repost a meme about the subway being late, but that’s just journalism. My building access still works but my equipment loan at the university got flagged. I’m a nursing student. I borrow a blood pressure cuff. What is happening? — Confused in Harlem
Dear Confused, Auntie has heard this story before. The meme was probably fine. The algorithm, however, has opinions about everything. Submit your supplementary documentation, keep copies of every automated response, and find the person two years ahead of you who already navigated this. There is always someone two years ahead of you. Also: learn to take blood pressure manually. It is a skill that will outlast every platform ever built. — Auntie NYC
Dear Auntie NYC, I attended the Foley Square rally for the 20-hour workweek. It was the first political event I’ve been to in my life. I’m 41. I cried a little when Stevens spoke, which I was not expecting and would prefer not to discuss further. My question is: what do I do now? — Newly Activated, Mott Haven
Dear Newly Activated, You go to the next one. That’s it. That’s the whole instruction. The crying means something landed — Auntie has learned to trust that. You don’t have to become a person who goes to rallies. You just have to be the person who went to one, and then showed up again. Stevens built a movement out of people who showed up again. So did every movement before his. Welcome. There is always room near the edge of the crowd. — Auntie NYC
Dear Auntie NYC, My family wants to get a hologram of my grandmother. She died six weeks ago. I understand the technology exists and that it can be very lifelike. My feeling is that this is a terrible idea but I am outvoted three to one. Is there anything useful I can say at the next family meeting? — Outvoted in Flatbush
Dear Outvoted, Yes. Say this: the hologram is not her. Say it once, clearly, before anyone turns it on. Say it not as an objection but as a preparation — because the lifelikeness is exactly what makes it dangerous, and your family deserves to walk in with their eyes open. You are not wrong to be worried. You are also not wrong to let your family grieve in the way they need to. Both of these things can be true. Make sure there is someone — a real person, not a subscription — in the room when they first meet her. — Auntie NYC
Dear Auntie NYC, I am a former warehouse logistics coordinator. I now work twenty hours a week as a building systems technician. On my days off I have been taking a painting class on Willis Avenue. I am not good at painting. I am genuinely, empirically bad at it. My teacher says this doesn’t matter. Does it matter? — Bad Painter, Mott Haven
Dear Bad Painter, It does not matter. Auntie will go further: the badness is part of the point. You spent how many years being a function, moving things efficiently from one place to another, optimized and measurable? Now you are making something with your hands that is bad and yours and exists in the world for no reason except that you made it. That is not a small thing. That is, depending on your politics, either a human right or a revolutionary act. Keep going. Auntie wants to see what you make by October. — Auntie NYC
Dear Auntie NYC, There is a barter tent on Fordham Road near my apartment. I have been watching it for three weeks from across the street. I don’t know what I have to offer. I am a 54-year-old retired transit worker. I know how subway doors work. I know how to fix things. I don’t know if that counts. — Watching from the Bronx
Dear Watching, It counts. It counts enormously. Auntie wants you to cross the street. The whole premise of the barter network is that your labor has value the cash economy never learned to price — and a person who knows how things work, how they break, and how to fix them is exactly the kind of person the network was built for. The amber light means available to trade. You don’t need an appointment. You just need to cross the street. — Auntie NYC
Dear Auntie NYC, My son is seventeen and has been staying up until 3am making what he calls a DeepDive documentary about why people in our neighborhood voted the way they did in the last election. He interviews our neighbors without warning. Last Tuesday he knocked on the door of the man upstairs at 9pm with a holographic camera. I don’t know whether to ground him or apply for a grant. — His Mother, Jackson Heights
Dear His Mother, Apply for the grant. Ground him from the upstairs neighbor specifically, but apply for the grant. What your son is doing is exactly what the city’s journalism partners are trying to teach seniors at Green Rising School — and he figured it out himself at seventeen, in Jackson Heights, with a holographic camera. The 9pm door knock is a problem of manners, not of vocation. Teach him to call ahead. Do not teach him to stop. — Auntie NYC
Dear Auntie NYC, I uploaded my entire archive into the CE system two years ago. Twenty-one years of work. Exhibitions, teaching records, studio visits, all of it. My account now reads Not Displayable. I have been thinking about what the ledger actually contains and whether I was asking to be included or documenting something else entirely. I don’t really have a question. I just wanted to tell someone. — R.B., Location Withheld
Dear R.B., Auntie heard you. That’s enough for now. Keep showing up. — Auntie NYC
Dear Auntie NYC, I have been in the same cohort for twenty-two years. We have never voted on anything. We don’t have a chair. We don’t have bylaws. Last month the city sent us a form asking us to register as a “formal civic deliberation body” within thirty days or lose our eligibility to comment on the Queensborough rezoning proposal. We have twenty-three questions about this form. One of them is: what is a thirty-day deadline for people who have been having the same conversation for two decades? — Temporally Misaligned, Jackson Heights
Dear Temporally Misaligned, Submit your twenty-three questions. All of them. The city planners will not know how to answer several of them and that is useful information for everyone. The conversation you have been having for twenty-two years is doing something that the form cannot measure. Don’t let the form convince you otherwise. Also, answer question seventeen first. Auntie has a feeling about question seventeen. — Auntie NYC