#46: The greatest drug in the world
It's getting me through the end of the pandemic
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Good morning. I know the news has been awful. I want to warn that this newsletter is not going to be about that.
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The building was monstrous and gray and everything we said we didn’t want. The walls were hospital-beige, the doors to the 90-something units heavy and industrial, “like a storage facility for humans,” as Avi later described it. The real estate broker led us through a maze of eerily empty hallways, his excitement palpable. There were four he had in mind, he said, as he pushed through a set of swinging double doors, sending a whoosh of medicinal air into our faces. Avi and I exchanged looks.
“Wow, so spacious!” I said (honestly) as we entered the first apartment, and as we left: “We’re probably okay to just see the one.” The broker looked confused, already jangling the keys to the next unit. “I just mean....we’ve already got a great sense of the place!” I chirped, so sick of my own performativity I felt betrayed on his behalf.
It was all my fault, really. Not that buildings like that abound in Brooklyn, which I find depressing, but because we were there at 3 p.m. on a Saturday, our fourth viewing of the day, our faces sweating under our masks and our perfectly fine apartment sitting empty. I’d gotten us here: with my voracious desire to move and my insistence that a bigger apartment was going to make us happier and also possibly save our lives. But my enthusiasm, in this light, had taken on the shape of mania. As we walked to our car, laughing a little, the moment felt spiritually similar to finding yourself at a dying warehouse party at 5 a.m. surrounded by people you don’t know. It was time to go home.
It had all started two months prior, when a friend of a friend was looking for someone to fill her apartment. For only a couple hundred more dollars a month, we would get an office and a living space big enough to fit a table. Our imaginations went wild. Suddenly all our overtures about never moving again seemed silly. “We will die in this apartment,” we used to joke, usually after tediously building another piece of furniture to accommodate our lack of storage space. Most of it wouldn’t even fit out the door, we reasoned, so why try? But here it was: the place to render all of that irrelevant. Just down the block, big enough to accommodate us both working from home full-time, and with a passthrough window between the kitchen and the living room—my most beloved apartment feature. I kept imagining passing cocktails through it to all my friends, none of us in masks, everyone drunk and happy. This was the promise of a new apartment: not just more space, but the end of the pandemic.
The owner was allergic to cats. There was no way she would allow one in the building, she said, and in a moment the dream was dashed. “Well, what if we just start looking a little, just to see what’s out there?” I asked Avi, like a coke addict insisting it doesn’t count if you only sniff it. “Sure,” he said. And that was it—the last time I knew peace.
It would be impossible to express the density and volume of energy I devoted to our apartment search over the next months, but I might draw comparisons to the sun. At times it felt out of my control, as if I’d become possessed by a real estate demon. Which isn’t to say it wasn’t fun—in fact, it was the best time I’d had in a year—it was just all-consuming. I checked StreetEasy at every hour of the day: in bed, between paragraphs, over dinner, during movies. I drew diagrams of apartment layouts and imagined where we’d put our couch. I mapped out how long it would take us to get to Manhattan, grab a coffee, visit friends, from hundreds of random addresses in Brooklyn. I looked at Google Street view and imagined saying to friends, “Oh, you won’t miss it, just look for the building with the weird peach door!” It was as if combing StreetEasy had unlocked a passage to a forgotten part of my brain. The one where eagerness and optimism dwelled, and I didn’t want to leave.
But by the time we toured the human storage facility, I could admit my zeal had taken us too far. I’d been drawn in by the price-per-square-foot: three big bedrooms and a big kitchen for just $500 more dollars than we pay now. But this apartment was not for us, it was for families. And it was in a Hasidic enclave, where we didn’t know anyone and couldn’t read most of the neighborhood signs. I had gotten greedy, my brain fogged by pandemic claustrophobia, the purpose of this “exploratory search” all but forgotten. What was that purpose, exactly? I wondered that on the way home. “Maybe we just shouldn’t move,” I said to Avi, less disappointed by the idea of staying in our place as I was by the loss of the high of anticipation: the greatest drug in the world. We had one more viewing scheduled for that day. “We might as well just go,” Avi said.
Plans
A 2010 study by Applied Research in Quality of Life found that the most substantial shift in happiness as a result of vacation occurs before you take it. Put another way: planning a trip often makes you happier than the trip itself. The period of anticipation is intoxicating; rather than being limited to the present moment, you get to imagine enjoying infinite things in infinite future moments. Free from the baggage of real life—your hunger or your sore back or disagreements with the friend you traveled with—you create a highlight reel of everything you want the trip to be and play it over and over as a form of escape from everything you dread right now. Sometimes, then, the reason you planned the trip is addressed through the planning of the trip itself. You could see this as depressing, or you could see it as kind of sweet.
When I imagine the pandemic receding and life regaining a texture no longer informed by viral particles, I think the only thing I’ll miss about this time is how drunk we all were on anticipation, especially as the end drew closer. The thirst and fervor for life is everywhere—in texts, on Twitter, in essays. It’s like we’re all looking forward to the trip of a lifetime, but perhaps most charmingly, it’s not a fancy vacation we’re excited for, but quotidian things: riding the train, hugging friends, going to dinner, walking around with a coffee, passing a cocktail through a kitchen window. There is something childlike about looking forward to such small events. It strikes me as fundamentally good, and not an emotion I would have ever thought to cultivate.
In an essay for The Cut last week, Allison P. Davis wrote about anticipating touch: “I have had the most persistent fantasy. I’m at a crowded bar, so surrounded by people it takes 35 minutes to get a drink, but I don’t care because of the flesh. As I wait, a person I am with, or maybe a stranger—all right, it’s a fantasy, so definitely a stranger, and not just any stranger but a stranger I would try to make out with in a corner later—needs to get by, so they put their hand on the small of my back and lean in toward my ear to murmur, ‘Can I squeeze through?’” It’s the ultimate pandemic fantasy, and even if the real thing doesn’t live up to her idea of it, it doesn’t really matter. I want to be touched in a bar too, and my month has been markedly better for imagining it.
Anticipation has been central to my desire to move. After a full pandemic year stuck in my apartment with my boyfriend, not even the end of quarantine could provide enough distance between me and this time. And so, once I adjusted to the idea of moving—and convinced myself it actually might be fun, like an art project—it became wrapped up in my post-covid fantasy: Not only would it be sunny, and everyone vaccinated, but I would be living in a brand new space. One where I hadn’t despaired innumerable times or feared death or stared at the bubble in the ceiling from when it rained in 2018. One where Trump had never been president and I had never gotten mad at my boyfriend for telling me, during our 400th home-cooked quarantine meal, that it was pointless to boil pasta in chicken broth.
As maddening as it felt at times, my search for a new home was all my present optimism condensed into a single pursuit. It became as important to me as life itself.
When I told my therapist about this, she described something called “manic defence.” According to Dr. Neel Burton of Psychology Today, “manic defence is the tendency, when presented with uncomfortable thoughts or feelings, to distract the conscious mind either with a flurry of activity or with the opposite thoughts or feelings.” My therapist told me that sometimes, even in neurotypical people, a period of mania can follow a period of depression. I thought back on the order of things—the depression I felt through late last year and the way it lifted in the start of 2021, when the hunt began. Like the confused math lady meme, I laid one timeline over the other, suspicious of their perfect fit. Dr. Burton goes on: “The essence of the manic defence is to prevent feelings of helplessness and despair from entering the conscious mind by occupying it with opposite feelings of euphoria, purposeful activity, and omnipotent control.”
Re-Up
Avi and I walked to our final viewing. It was an unseasonably sunny day, and the main drag by this last apartment was teeming with happy-looking people in light jackets, so different from our sleepy one. One store was playing music out of its windows, some guys were grilling on the street. My childlike optimism, so easily snuffed out at the previous viewing, was reignited. I felt it in my stupid grin. The building was old, charming, and red, a basket of snacks sat by the front door. Three floors up, a warm woman welcomed us in, the current tenant. She showed us the dishwasher and the little office where we could work and the tiny balcony big enough for a single, contemplative chair. She said she loved the apartment and the owner, but was leaving New York. She took us up to the shared roof, decorated with communal furniture, where Avi and I locked eyes and gently panicked. We needed to move there right away.
When we left I typed out an email to her on the street, squinting at my phone, then proceeded to check my email every two minutes for the next hour. Once she got back, she connected us with the landlord, to whom I wrote a drawn out note with more information than he could possibly need. The next morning, he called. We hunched eagerly over my speakerphone in pajamas and had a conversation seemingly more focused on assessing our characters than our financial viability. At the end, he told us it was ours. We hung up and screamed like kids on the last day of school.
We move in two weeks, on Easter. “We’ll be coming back to life just like Jesus,” Avi said, taking a wild guess at the meaning of the holiday. Naturally, my manic energy has found a new outlet: moving. I’ve made documents and spreadsheets, started researching dining tables that can double as workspaces. I’ve drawn diagrams of the layout, mapped our new apartment to all my favorite places. The other morning I walked over to it and stood on the street looking at it like a creep. I imagined passing through the front gate with heavy groceries, annoyed instead of euphoric. (You know, the good stuff.) On my walk home I noticed the trees were budding again. The same ones I’d watched bloom last April in the first months of the pandemic, turn green in the summer, orange in the fall, and finally return to bare. And there they were again, the little buds so close to blooming I almost sneezed just looking at them.
Spring in New York is always special because it represents a collective exhale. A long winter behind us, our bodies wild with anticipation of the entire warm season ahead, it’s like we’re all looking forward to the same amorphous, happy thing. Some people bemoan East Coast winters, but I wouldn’t trade the feeling that inevitably follows them, so long-awaited and reliable. But last spring we didn’t get that relief of tension. We’ve been holding our breath for longer than we thought imaginable. And while it’s not uncomplicated or without its share of grief, it’s coming: the exhale. “If I’m being honest,” Allison P. Davis wrote, “I just want to take a bong rip of someone’s breath.” You can’t fake this level of anticipation. It must be the strongest cut of the drug imaginable. Lean in and take a hit.
1. “It Was A Banner Year For Asian Representation. Now What?” by the always-precise Connie Wang for Refinery29, which explores the limits of focusing on forms of racism that affect elites over deep-seated systems that exploit the most vulnerable. “Stop Asian Hate highlights a crucial wrong. But as a solution, I believe that it's as misguided as trying to prevent bullying by telling a tormentor that they’ve hurt their victims’ feelings—that was always their intention, after all.”
Solidarity with the entire AAPI community. I can’t imagine the pain you’ve been through over the last week.
If anyone is looking to redistribute some money, I recommend CAAAV, an organization working to build “grassroots community power across diverse poor and working class Asian immigrant and refugee communities in New York City.” Also, here are the verified GoFundMe pages for the families of Hyun Jung Grant, Suncha Kim, Delain Ashley Yaun Gonzalez, Yong Yue, Paul Michels, and for the medical bills of Elcias Hernandez Ortiz.
2. This tweet:
3. Also this tweet from 2018 that I remembered the other day and cried for a second time:
4. “We All Have to Become Philosophers: An Interview With Vivian Gornick,” by Haley Mlotek for Hazlitt. I know she’s been interviewed a lot lately but I’m a Gornick stan and I liked this one.
5. Season 4 of Search Party, which continues to be an incredible show filled with incredible people.
6. “Prophets,” a short story by Brandon Taylor for Joyland that leaves a thrilling amount up to interpretation. “But perhaps that was the way it always was, that when someone did something to you, you became a little more like them and a little less like yourself.”
7. The definition for the word ekphrasis: “the use of detailed description of a work of visual art as a literary device” (from the above short story).
8. “How Billionaires See Themselves,” a really rich and enraging analysis by Nathan J. Robinson for Current Affairs, based on a spate of memoirs by rich people. This is one of the best critiques I’ve read of the billionaire mindset (and capitalism itself).
9. This iconic Patagonia ad from 1995.
10. The Olafur Eliasson episode of the Netflix docuseries on design, Abstract. I watched it randomly knowing nothing about the show and was completely charmed and entranced. (It’s S2E1 if you want to watch. Also I’m sure there are other good eps I just haven’t watched them!)
11. My friend Adrian’s new single, which I love:
12. “Crack, a Tiffany Drug at Woolworth Prices,” a famous feature by Gary Michael Cooper for SPIN’s 1986 issue, regarded as one of the first pieces about the crack epidemic. I read it because Avi and I watched New Jack City, a famous movie also written by Gary Michael Cooper and regarded as one of the first films to depict the crack epidemic. I don’t think Cooper’s perspective on the drug aligns with modern progressive thought (or mine), but it was a fascinating look into history and how the era contended with the crisis as it was happening. Also Cooper’s SPIN piece is so poetically and captivatingly written.
13. “The future of L.A. is here. Robin D.G. Kelley’s radical imagination shows us the way,” an interview with Robin D.G. Kelley by Vincent Cunningham, who calls Kelley “the greatest historian of our era.” I’ll be thinking about this interview for a while.
14. All 22 minutes of this room makeover, for some reason, by a student living in a room that is four square meters. Actually a bunch of small-space makeovers on YouTube, all by extremely ambitious DIY teens I do not relate to (cutting into the wall to move an outlet??? I’m inspired).
15. The rigatoni from Carmenta’s in Bushwick, which is so good I feel like I owe someone something when I eat it. It’s the best pasta dish I’ve ever had, and I’ve only ever had it delivered? Sounds fake.
On the Maybe Baby podcast this week, Allison P. Davis of New York Magazine is coming on to talk about anticipation as a pillar of a life well-lived—meaning not just post-pandemic excitement but also horniness and love and desire in a broader sense. (She’s writing a book on horniness right now, thank god.) You might know Allison from some of her popular features like The Karen Next Door or her profiles of Mariah Carey or Lena Dunham. As always the ep drops Tuesday @ 9 a.m.
Also, next week is my monthly advice column, Dear Baby, where I’ll be answering five reader questions in essay form. It’s for paying subscribers only but as always I’ll send one Q&A for free.
Thanks for reading!
Haley
This month a portion of subscriber proceeds will be redistributed to GlobalGiving Coronavirus Relief Fund, a non-profit focused on equitable vaccine distribution and getting resources to those made especially vulnerable by the pandemic.
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