joy where you can get it
this week in exuberance
On Saturday, I went for a half-hearted jog around the neighborhood, still queasy that the election hadn’t been called after five agonizing days (hats off to Pop Crave, though, a visionary). I got home, fretted on FaceTime with my parents, ate a massive bodega turkey, egg and cheese, and flipped on CNN at 11:20 a.m., so I could watch just a little bit more of John King reciting random county names and numbers at me. Four minutes later, there was the familiar sound of that anxiety-inducing (and overused!!!) key race sting, and Wolf Blitzer announced that Joe Biden was projected to be the next president of the United States.
Some people thought that we wouldn’t get something so definitive maybe ever, that the election and its aftermath would be so consumed with chaos and uncertainty that there wouldn’t be a spontaneous outpouring of joy and celebration. Those people, I am happy to tell you, were INCORRECT.
My neighborhood in Central Harlem popped off. The aerobics class that meets in the park exploded into whoops and cheers. Cars honked, people came out on their fire escapes to applaud and bang on pots and pans. We all flashed goofy, toothy smiles at each other. When I went to the liquor store down the street to buy champagne, the Frenchman who works there ambled in already a little drunk and hugged the cashier, who was dancing to Gonna Make You Sweat.
At the traffic circle at 110th and Frederick Douglass, there was even more exuberance, more dancing, more honking, people blowing whistles and waving American flags, a dozen champagne bottles lined up on the curb like lucky totems. It felt thrilling, obscene even in our current era of painstaking distancing, to feel so physically and psychically close with strangers. It came with its risks, for sure, but fuck it, we deserved it. “Uh oh, I’m euphoric,” I texted a friend. I scrolled through Twitter and saw that spontaneous street parties were breaking out all over the city--I was jealous I could not be at every single one of them.
Eventually, I ended up on the Great Lawn in Central Park, where waves of applause broke out every 20 minutes. It was 71 degrees and perfect, the light hitting the trees, ablaze in their full fall glory, just right. It felt even better than I imagined. I went to bed sun-soaked, a little hungover and happy.
Everything, of course, is tinged with considerable sadness. Some of the facts of our current predicament, they floor me. How could it not be a 50-state landslide when one of the choices on the ticket was a feckless, cartoon authoritarian with a barely-concealed desire to build a white nationalist state and punish people of color along the way? How could 68 million of our fellow countrymen have wanted four more years of this cruelty and mayhem? How could they want it as they literally lay dying? How can we now be in the middle of the world’s stupidest and slowest-moving coup attempt? Even the perfect day seemed sinister if you looked too closely: balmy in November.
But if we’ve learned anything in the last nine months (four years?) of hell, isn’t it that you have to take your joy where you can get it? The mood on Saturday was a close cousin to the ones that run through all the protests that have sprung up in the Trump era: the Women’s March, the uprising at JFK after the announcement of the Muslim ban, the rallies to demand an end to family separation, the marches this summer to protest police brutality. There too people blow whistles and bang on drums; they hand out masks, hand sanitizer, water bottles and granola bars; they mind each other’s children, and the mailboxes twerk. We reach out a hand in the dark to help one another. It’s that spirit of joyful defiance that I’d like to take with me, because I have a feeling we’re still going to need it.
We’re going to get back to our regularly-scheduled cultural crit programming shortly (bear with me while I figure out what this is going to be, exactly!!!) but it felt fitting to do a full ode to joy this week.
Here are some JOYOUS recommendations for what’s gotten me through these stressful last two weeks:
I had Domino’s pizza with Italian sausage, jalapenos and mushrooms for dinner on Election Night, and cold the next morning for breakfast. Yes, I do recommend this.
This essay from Sarah Miller about France vs. Frahnce, published on the same day that Emily in Paris was renewed for a second season, jury’s still out on if JOY is the right word for how the show made me feel
These giant pan-banged chocolate chip cookies that allegedly went viral years ago but are a quarantine discovery for me
The episode of Girlfriends in which Toni gets botched Botox
These freaking trees (I was once again, rhapsodizing about them at dinner the other night when a rat ran by my foot)
