Hi everyone!
Assassination coordinates: I’ll be in Memphis for one (1) night this weekend. Come by Lamp tomorrow night if you can! Then I’ll be in Jackson for the Mississippi Book Festival (anyone going?), a wedding, and to catch up with my old roommate Kathryn. Life has been so full but I am terribly ready to be sat. Here’s this month in Adam Sandler, Ezra Klein, and other things I meant to tell you.
When I was a kid, one of the ways I played independently was making calendars. I’m serious. I would take blank sheets of copy paper, fold them in half, and meticulously trace grids, turning them into days. What’s worse is that I don’t even remember filling the calendars with anything. I would simply delineate the days from one another and then bask in the order of one week switching into the next without bleeding or blending together. What is a calendar but a space of complete certainty?
Even now, I love designing and arranging calendars. There’s a perverse pleasure in laying out a future without any friction from reality. The pixels of my screen know nothing about what it feels like to exist in a body, to walk miles in repentance and reclamation, to mourn or to make choices. To look at a room full of teenagers and say, “I can’t help you.” To see the ghost of a landfill everywhere I look and ask, constantly, is any of this worth it?
I’ve often said that planning something is more fun for me than actually doing it. “Fun.” Fun, as in not difficult or challenging in any way. Sometimes (more often than I’d like to admit), I want to fast-forward the experience part of an experience.
It’s like I’m an ant marching diligently along the lines of the calendar, my body bound to the right angles and set paths. I’m so intoxicated by pheromones, the promise of this space with no resistance, that I’m blind to the pleasure of the world around me.
Ezra Klein, quite abruptly, reveals these same anxieties in a recent episode of The Ezra Klein Show. When his guest, Jia Tolentino, asks if he finds pleasure in the things he assigns value to in his life, Klein seems almost dumbfounded. It’s so funny to me, actually, hearing a famously sensible thinker completely unable to concede that we should pursue pleasure. It’s funny, but in a way that deeply struck a chord within me. Here’s what he says:
I’ll say, I guess, this. I am struggling with this question quite a lot lately in my own life where I am so driven, sometimes, by internal pressure that things that I think are pleasurable have been drained of their pleasure.
And literally, this morning, when I was getting ready for my day, I just have this note in my notebook about the things I need to do today. I’m like, can you try to be driven by something other than this internal pressure?
When I began writing about politics, I was a blogger in college before blogs were basically even a thing. There was no thought of it being a career. It was done for nothing but a kind of pleasure, right? A kind of delight in being engaged in the world and trying, in some small way, to understand it, and even in some even smaller, completely inconsequential way to influence it.
And now that I have this much bigger platform, it’s so much less pleasurable. And so, I think it’s interesting, this idea you’re getting at of expanding pleasure.
It’s tempting to burrow into the safety of a frictionless reality, my own escape from our modern world no different than anyone else’s. But the pixels of my screen, the certainty of time, also know nothing about what it feels like to chase a river along a highway in the mountains, to let the wind whip across your face as you yell towards your sister. To forgive a friend, or to ask for forgiveness in return. To be welcomed in a church as a non-believer, to be a non-believer who believes in people.
Things the pixels of my screen will never experience:
A BRAT green charged-and-operational vape falling out of a purse I hadn’t worn in over a year as I packed up my room to move away from Memphis, TN
Asking for a vodka Red Bull at a bar in Bushwick and being told “we only have vodka Yerbs”
Finding my favorite movie at a thrift store for $0.99, pictured above :)
Saying “I guess we’ll never know!” when someone tries to search something online mid-conversation
Things the pixels of my screen have gifted me:
My favorite thing I searched online this month—is coconut water good flower food? (Yes, it is)
Harry Potter Logic Puzzle on Sporcle
This clip from While We’re Young
How did you play as a kid? Is your life playful now? Honestly more fruitful questions than I had anticipated. Thanks for reading!
Kendall
i used to write down every title to every book in my "library" in a old green ledger I got from my great grandfather's house. it's funny, because i'm not particularly organized, but I think i just loved that big green book with beautiful subtle lines on old paper, and looking at my books as a collection. I remember sitting on the floor in front of the bookshelf, dreaming of the day I had a library as big as belle's.