I accidentally turned my apartment into a clay oven
God, I love summer, even when summer is determined to punish me. As you may have heard from the endless grousing of New Yorkers (we never suffer silently), the city regularly crosses the 90 degree mark these days. In Texas, 100 degrees is no big deal — you’ll just have to scamper across the parking lot faster in between air conditioned freezers. In the Northeast, the heat can feel like being smothered in a damp sock and my little window unit cannot cope. Our concrete eighth-floor is transformed into a clay oven. This is partially i.e. entirely my fault; a couple of Mays ago, when it was completely reasonable outside, I decided to save ($150 maybe???) by buying a bitty unit that was way too small for our living room. Damn my penny-pinching.
When it got particularly bad a few weeks ago — the thermostat read 89 inside!! — I ran around the apartment in a threadbare cotton mumu, covering my face in wet towels stashed in the freezer. I reminded myself powerfully of my aunt, who during summers in Bangladesh would drag a bucket of ice water underneath the fan on the window sill and smother both of us with wet towels.
Would love to think I looked like this:
In actuality, a little more like this:
Still, I love summer. I love languid days that seem to stretch on endlessly into the dusk, even if we’re still working with the same 24 hours. I love paying too much for zucchini and tomatoes and basil at the farmer’s market. I love having a cold oyster and a glass of white wine on a random Tuesday evening, because summer is made for such luxury. I especially love when we come together to humiliate a shameless sex pest and send him packing back from whence he came (Westchester), and select a certified cutie who ran on ensuring that all of New York doesn’t turn into Hudson Yards (and they voted for him???). Like many of us, I’ve started associating elections with disappointment and catastrophe, so this last bit of good news felt downright euphoric.
The truth is, I’m not sure I’m handling ~ any of this ~ well. I felt low-grade bad, anxious, and panicked for the first few months of our collective ordeal, attuned to every awful breaking news alert, every slack notification. My fundamental belief remains the same: we are really good and fucked for at least a generation. The scale of suffering as a consequence is devastating, and I can’t see the path out.
At the same time, life just churns on as usual. I get up, I make my bed, I edit stories, I chat with coworkers. I make sure I know where my passport is at all times, but I’m paying less attention. I see friends and we commiserate — “ha ha America is over ha ha” — before changing the subject because how can you express the breadth of your despair over a bowl of spaghetti. I see headlines that make me feel like I’m having an out-of-body experience and it’s so surreal that the wisest choice seems to go numb.
A couple of years ago at Vox, political scientist Thomas Pepinsky wrote a piece about our false impressions of authoritarianism that I think about all the time.
The mental image that most Americans harbor of what actual authoritarianism looks like is fantastical and cartoonish. This vision has jackbooted thugs*, all-powerful elites acting with impunity, poverty and desperate hardship for everyone else, strict controls on political expression and mobilization, and a dictator who spends his time ordering the murder or disappearance of his opponents using an effective and wholly compliant security apparatus…
The reality is that everyday life under the kinds of authoritarianism that exist today is very familiar to most Americans. You go to work, you eat your lunch, you go home to your family. There are schools and businesses, and some people “make it” through hard work and luck. Most people worry about making sure their kids get into good schools. The military is in the barracks, and the police mostly investigate crimes and solve cases. There is political dissent, if rarely open protest, but in general people are free to complain to one another…. Everyday life in the modern authoritarian regime is, in this sense, boring and tolerable. It is not outrageous
*needless to say, we’ve already crossed the jackbooted thugs Rubicon.
Masha Gessen, whose precision in writing about all of this makes me feel a tiny bit more sane, echoes a similar point. Being so inundated by dumb, bad ideas that are now being transformed into bad, dumb policies is making us all a little dumber.
Life under autocracy can be terrifying, as it already is in the United States for immigrants and trans people. But those of us with experience can tell you that most of the time, for most people, it’s not frightening. It is stultifying. It’s boring. It feels like trying to see and breathe under water — because you are submerged in bad ideas, being discussed badly, being reflected in bad journalism and, eventually, in bad literature and bad movies.
The Guardian wrote a feature on the phenomenon of “hypernormalization,” a concept first coined by anthropologist Alexei Yurchak to describe the civilian experience in Soviet Russia.
Hypernormalization describes life in a society where two main things are happening. The first is people seeing that governing systems and institutions are broken. And the second is that, for reasons including a lack of effective leadership and an inability to imagine how to disrupt the status quo, people carry on with their lives as normal despite systemic dysfunction – give or take a heavy load of fear, dread, denial and dissociation.
The balance of going about your day, of wringing a little joy out of the mundane, while not becoming complacent, without crossing over to carelessness — that feels like one of the most profound challenges of this era.
I’m going to work. I’m voting. I’m sweating through another summer. I’m deciding what to make for dinner. I’m trying to hold onto what’s good even when everything that’s good seems to be slipping away. I haven’t figured any of it out but at the very least, we have many years left to keep trying.
Cheryl Strayed sent out a newsletter this weekend that said that the only thing that’s bringing her any solace lately is “making and doing things.” “Action and creation are a salve, a balm, a cure,” she wrote. I’ll add seeing beautiful things to that list, too. Some recent things that I saw (and ate) and loved:
A wonderful thing I watched recently: Sorry, Baby, which is just as funny and tender and moving as everyone says it is.
A beautiful thing I ate: I took Kartik to a fancy piano bar for his birthday and we had these absolutely enormous shrimp covered in horseradish. The price per shrimp may have bankrupted me but oh man, heaven.
A beautiful thing I observed in the greatest city in the world: A woman after finishing her run in Brooklyn Bridge Park yelling “I did it, you motherfuckers, I finished my run!!”