Edition #48: Necessitating the Unknown

Plus, a weekend in Prospect Park, the greatest dance film you'll ever see, and a cringy, relatable short story

A Note From the Editor

For the past three years (barring this one), my best friend and I have established a tradition of spending Halloween together here in New York. She drives over from Pittsburgh and we stuff the weekend with plans and sky-high expectations. The first year we overestimated our tolerance and missed a party at a beautiful apartment that I desperately wanted to attend. The second year we purchased tickets to an overpriced event at a secret location, only to discover that the event was rained out as we were headed out the door, clad in ridiculous costumes unsuitable for any other public place. By the third year, we tempered our expectations in attempts to embrace the bad fortune that felt inevitable. We didn’t make any grand plans or put any effort into our costumes. We made jokes about how the weekend was cursed and took bets on what would go wrong. Lo and behold, that weekend lives among my most fun, cherished memories.

The definition of the word fun is: (noun) what provides amusement or joy, (verb) to indulge in banter or play, (adjective) providing entertainment, amusement, or enjoyment. I hadn’t read any of those definitions before, but they all seem to fall flat in the face of the thing we search for with the same unquenchable vigor as happiness. Fun is the quirky younger sibling of happiness; less heavy, more attainable, showing its face at times when we least expect it and concealing itself at times where we’re depending on its arrival. By this definition, fun requires a level of spontaneity to exist. This explains why most people are finding it impossible to have fun during the pandemic, a time when we’ve been stripped of the freedom that comes with making unbridled decisions. To quote Travis Tae, a professor who has been studying fun for the past five years,

“It’s different from other emotional or affective terms. You never say you ‘have sadness.’ But we frame fun as coming from somewhere else, which gives it unique commercial potential.”

This characterization feels partially involuntary, as though having fun is something we aren’t able to control if only because it requires a level of randomness to achieve — similar to the way we talk about love. We “have” fun and we “fall” in love, neither experience is framed as a voluntary choice. Instead, they are occurrences that happen to us. We cannot force ourselves to have fun the same way we cannot strong-arm our way into falling in love, and it is this uncontrollable nature that makes both experiences extraterrestrial. Our human desire to dictate outcomes is irrelevant in the worlds of fun and love and this rare and total loss of control is liberating. In our most fun memories and in our deepest loves, we were swept up and away from ourselves whether we liked it or not.

In Chloe Benjamin’s second novel, The Immortalists, a group of four young siblings visit a local psychic to find out the exact dates of their imminent deaths. The information they obtain shapes the way they live their lives, willing each character to take chances he or she may not have taken otherwise or to hunker down and seek answers in order to make sense of the unknown. After reading the novel, asking the question became one of my favorite pastimes: if you could find out the exact date of your death right now, would you? Everyone I asked was quick to answer with a definitive yes or no, coupled with justifications. The “yes” people often said that if they knew they were dying soon, they’d abandon their half baked careers and perfunctory obligations to do something spontaneous, like travel the world or pursue a great love. To that I would rebut, why not do it now, if there’s a chance you might die tomorrow? But it was a moot point; without the guarantee of a ticker tilting towards the end, even the boldest of the bunch weren’t willing to go off the hinges in pursuit of a risk perverse life.

I’m not sure whether you are currently in love or whether you’ve been having much fun lately, but I’d like to pose a second question to consider: if you could preserve the state of your life exactly as it is now, would you? Meaning if you are employed, you would always be employed (by the same employer, at the same level), if you have health insurance, you would always have it (the exact coverage you have now), if you are in love, you would always be in love (with the same person, to the same degree you feel right now). The caveat is that you would not be able to change or improve; you must choose to stay precisely as you are, cementing whatever comforts your current life affords and ridding yourself of the potential for more or less. In the utter uncertainty of the world right now, you might consider the benefits of preserving your life exactly as it is, especially if you have some semblance of security. But if asked that question at this time last year, I would bet that your answer would have been a hard no, regardless of how well things were going.

Being an adult requires a certain suspension of disbelief. We must believe things will get better, that we will get better, that we are moving towards an improved state that is only possible when there is a level of uncertainty at play. The unknown is scary but it is also a gift, a promise that things might improve, just as they might get worse. It is precisely that precariousness that enables life’s greatest joys, like having fun and falling in love, and life’s greatest pains, like losing a loved one and losing faith in your country. In the bleakness we are promised the possibility of light, and that possibility itself is enough to keep us trudging forward.

Cheers my dears, and I hope you are hanging in there this week. I’d be curious to hear your answer to either question: would you find out the exact date of your death if you could, or would you preserve the exact state of your life, if you could? Both are fun questions to pose to your loved ones, and both have the potential to lead to a captivating conversation.

“My head is bursting with the joy of the unknown. My heart is expanding a thousandfold.”
-Rumi

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Three Pieces of Content Worth Consuming

1. A Photo Diary Documenting a Weekend in Prospect Park. Whether or not you live in the New York City area, you've likely heard someone confidently claim that New York is dead, conjuring images of abandoned storefronts, shuttered businesses, and vacant office buildings. But this photo essay depicts New York as it is now and as it will always be — full of life, celebration, color, and character. Anyone who has ever lived in New York knows that sitting in the park is one of the best ways to spend a weekend, as it reminds you that you live in a city where hundreds of tiny galaxies of people are co-existing all at once and there’s really nothing else like it.

2. A Short Story That Will Make Your Cringe With Recognition. When “Cat Person” was published by The New Yorker three years ago, the story almost instantly went viral. On the foreground it may not make a ton of sense, as the narrative is not particularly literary nature — a college-aged girl has a brief relationship with an older man who she amplifies in her mind to be something that he is not — but after reading, you’ll understand why it was such a sensation. Never has a story so closely captured an experience that is both individual and universal, and you will likely find the flavor of disillusionment and self-deception utterly familiar.

   “Every so often, over the next day or so, she would find herself in a gray, daydreamy mood, missing something, and she'd realize that it was Robert she missed, not the real Robert but the Robert she'd imagined on the other end of all those text messages during break.”

3. The Tenure Track Professor Donating Plasma to Pay His Bills. It's simple to think about income in America as a simplified, black and white equation: you are either rich enough to afford organic produce and vacations in Italy or you are so poor that you live off of food stamps and government aid — but of course, there are a million shades of gray between. This essay was a sucker punch because it was so ordinary; a tenure track professor describes the financial struggles that have propelled him to drive over 100 miles on multiple occasions to donate his plasma for a meager sum of money in order to pay his bills. In him I saw myself, I saw my academic friends, I saw so many others. And while his situation certainly isn't the worst one out there, it is still, in its own way, dire.

   “Here are my vitals: I have more than $200,000 in student loans and $46,000 in credit card debt—all accumulated during my B.A., M.A., and Ph.D., and then search for a tenure-track job.”

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Perhaps You Should…
Distract Yourself with Dance

Amidst the panicked state of the country yesterday, my older sister sent me a music video to cheer me up. It was the perfect distraction and watching it sent me down a rabbit hole of music videos, leading me to re-watch this unreal film by Parris Goebel. You might recognize Goebel as the award-winning choreographer behind Justin Beiber’s “Sorry” music video and, more recently, J. Lo’s explosive Super Bowl halftime show. This film is not the official music video for “Yummy,” but it should be. The dancing, the quality of the shots and the transitions, the facial expressions! I’ve never seen anything like it.

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**Bonus Content** (A Twitter Thread About Disney Movies)

In the name of distraction and humor, I present to you, a Twitter thread in which the author describes, with startling accuracy, the 18 types of songs you will hear in every old school animated Disney movie.

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A Quote From A Book You Should Read:

“I want money and a house with a pool and a partner who loves me and my own lab filled with only the most brilliant and strong women. I want a dog and a Nobel Prize and to find a cure to addiction and depression and everything else that ails us. I want everything and I want to want less.”

-Transcendent Kingdom by Ya Gyasi

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This newsletter is best served with a side of conversation, so drop your opinions, reflections, and thoughts in the comments below and let’s get to talking.

Or, share the most thought-provoking piece from today’s edition with someone you love, then call them up to discuss, debate, and percolate. As a wise woman once said, “Great minds discuss ideas.”