notes from summer
just... what i've been up to!
i.
It occurs to me as I am walking home, dressed like I did during many a preteen summer—Nike track shorts, big tee shirt, and Birkenstocks, face clear save for remnants of skincare and sunscreen applied that morning and a thin layer of sweat, hair wavy and wild—only now slightly older and slightly stoned, in the city and not the suburbs, licking a chocolate-vanilla twist cone, that I have never in my adult life seen a fellow grown-up order chocolate ice cream at the Mister Softee truck.
Earlier that evening I hit a vape that makes me cough every time but I still occasionally pull from because it was a gift and sometimes you just want instant gratification and not the whole be-sure-to-consume-with-soluble-fats! charade an edible involves, downloaded the Mister Softee truck finder app, queued The Innocence Mission’s Glow through my AirPods, and set out on a long walk. All day long I had sat at my computer, trying to write my book in stilted bursts, staring at walls of text and too many tabs trying to put together a puzzle I still haven’t quite found the edges of and feeling increasingly unintelligent as time ticked on. As the sun began to set, it occurred to me that I had not been outside since that morning’s trip to Duane Reade for my required writing provisions of sugar free Red Bull and Nerd Gummy Clusters that I would later—as I do every time—come to regret.
But about the ice cream: It was my third of the week. That Tuesday I had half a pint of vanilla-chocolate Halo Top. On Thursday, vanilla and chocolate—just a dollop this time—again, this time with a few sliced strawberries that had likely been sitting out for hours, from 16 Handles. Now Saturday, as I consumed my third twist, in a cone this time, slowly and methodically, trying to make it last far longer than I knew it would, even though the air was cooler than it had been all week and I wasn’t all that hungry, the overwhelming profile of the chocolate half leaving me feeling sort of sorry that I did not get straight vanilla, I wondered if this was what made me an adult at last. As a child, chocolate is all adventure, all excitement, pure indulgence. Vanilla is safe, boring, nothing on its own, only worthy if it were dipped in a hard shell or coated with sprinkles. Now, the thought of plain chocolate overwhelms me. I wondered, perhaps unoriginally, if being older means realizing that you were being a snob about vanilla this whole time.
I do not mean to make this any kind of appreciation for vanilla in a sort of foodie sense. I do not wish to protest that making vanilla synonymous with “bland” does the flavor great injustice. I do not care to examine the complexity of a gourmet vanilla ice cream, the notes of tobacco and pepper and butter and burnt toast and tree bark and caramel and grass and salt and sea air. Whatever. Like I know. And anyway: This is Mister Softee vanilla we’re talking about here.
Vanilla soft serve is unpretentious. It tastes clean and cold, a flavor that is a non-flavor in the best possible sense. Vanilla soft serve is a blank page. It’s whatever you make it to be.
At least, this is what I tell my sister on a sloppily recorded voice note, long pauses between words as I audibly—enough to disgust me when I listen later—attend to my cone. At the end of it, I ask if she’ll save the audio and send it back to me: “I’m probably just high, but I feel like I can turn this into something, like a paragraph in a piece that I write at some point about my summer, and make it sound good and not stupid,” I say. I hate that my brain works this way: Never not composing, never not gathering grist for the mill. But here I am, trying to turn it into something. I don’t think it sounds much less stupid than it did in its earliest variation.
ii.
On weekends, I stay up late. Later than I have since pre-pandemic, evenings when I’d go out to some show or something, the lateness of my night being more due to the long commute home than any amount of fun I was having. Only this time, I stay up late like I did in high school, sometimes college: I stay home. I do nothing. I read one article then another then find myself on a Wikipedia page for some reference made in one of those articles. I watch a handful of videos on YouTube: old celebrity interviews and trailers for movies I don’t even want to see and clips from movies I’m thinking about watching but can’t commit to renting. I fill carts at various online retailers and abandon them, watch Instagram stories of people I haven’t spoken to in a decade, Google things like “el nino 4.5 extinction event” and “how to make tomato vinaigrette” and “how to grow green onions from green onions” and “sabrina carpenter height” and “what are blanks.” I start a movie knowing it’s already 11, then act surprised when I turn to my clock and it’s 2 a.m.
In these quiet early morning hours where the only light comes from the purple glow of Roku City, the veil between past and present becomes so thin as to almost become non-existent. A surreal feeling of deja vu takes over. If I blink, or turn my head just so, it feels for a moment like, within the four walls of my apartment, it’s 2009.
iii.
The night the Knicks win the Championship I am not in New York, but at my parents’ house in Pennsylvania after a long afternoon at my cousin’s surprise birthday party. All day long I joke that she’s the only person I would leave New York for on such a generational day like this, but when the evening creeps in and the game starts and we are still in the car with another hour to home and my signal cutting in and out as we drive through rolling rural hills, I can feel myself growing irritated and childish. My parents stop at a fried chicken place for dinner and I excuse myself to sit in the car, the way I did when I was 20 and driven to bratty panic by the sight of food I couldn’t eat. The light is too bright in here, I say. I’m overstimulated, I say. I can’t with the buzzing noise the AC is making, I say.
Before we make the turn to their house, they make a right towards the Wegman’s instead and I sputter but follow my mother inside anyway. I still haven’t had dinner. I split away from her and pick up a bottle of wine and a box of salad greens and a protein bar, and while I’m holding my phone in front of me, the rudest person alive, eyes glued to the game, she calls to ask where I am, and the feed cuts out.
Later, when Wemby bricks a Hail Mary three pointer in the final five seconds, I shriek and whoop and yell “fucking lameass Slenderman bitch!” at the TV in my parents’ living room as my mother shakes her head. My friends send me photos and videos from New York’s crowded streets and I tell them over and over again “I’ve never had such FOMO in my life.”
iv.
I am running again. Regularly, diligently. Three times a week at minimum, trying to take it seriously enough to be disciplined but not so seriously that I quit again. The sport has been my longest on- and off-again relationship, carrying on just over 20 years now, though more in an off-again setting for at least the past five.
Before, I could take long breaks and come back somehow the same. I could spend months pursuing other fitness interests, call it varying my routine even though what I was really doing was finally realizing I had the free will to become a Goldilocks runner, only venturing out when my mood and the weather were just right. But now, no matter how good my cardio endurance was otherwise, no matter how strong my core strength, my upper body strength, my quad strength: It’s not the same. The speed that always snapped back as muscle memory isn’t there. I start a full minute slower than I used to be and every day as I steadily eek my mile time back down, I try to be okay with that. I try to remain patient, a skill that does not come easily to me.
It is miserably hot, but I stick with it. I force myself to work at an easy pace even though the desire to treat every run as a race tempts. I build my mileage back up from three milers cautiously, deliberately trying to avoid the stress fractures that have plagued me in the past but desperate, as is my wont, to do more, to push harder, to chase an ever-moving target of what feels like enough. I consider signing up for a half marathon, thinking even more discipline and structure would do me well, then I walk the impulse back. When I run six and a half miles one truly heinously steamy Sunday, I try to sit with the proud feeling that I covered a distance that I haven’t approached, save for walks, in at least a year, if not two. I try to tell myself that despite the dew point, I kept the same pace I have for runs half the length, and I felt good. But there is always the voice in my ear who is never satisfied: You ran six and a half miles? she asks. And that feels like something to be proud of? To consider successful? Do you know how far you used to run? Girl, get a fucking grip.
The next Sunday, I take off on an out and back along the Hudson, 8 miles that I intended to run at 8 a.m. but, due to various undiagnosed ADD-related reasons, end up starting closer to 1 p.m. The air is surprisingly cool and lacking in any humidity; it’s the platonic ideal of a perfect summer day. As I run, I listen to Paul Simon’s 1991 Concert In The Park from the start, with no skips, finishing just as I get to the second disc, running negative splits as “You Can Call Me Al” jams on, my tired legs flying.
A month or so earlier, in a conversation with a friend of a friend who had prompted me for my five desert island discs, I named this one first, with little hesitation. I’ve been captivated by it for more than half my life, the way it’s an unintentional greatest hits album—the majority of the setlist comes from his two most recent albums, but 35 years of hindsight have now rendered those then-new songs all-timers—made even greater by its transformative mixing that makes me feel, with every single listen, that I’m actually there, dancing on Central Park’s Great Lawn with tens of thousands of strangers, the gentle summer night breeze carrying the wafting scent of weed and kissing my bare shoulders.
I get an ice cream on my walk home. Maybe, as the viral TikTok sound likes to say, the program I’m running isn’t too fucking strict.
v.
The week of July 4th, the temperatures crack 100 for three consecutive days and on the second, I leave my apartment to spend the entire day at the movies. Between a matinee of The Invite and an evening showing of Jackass 5 (I contain multitudes) I park myself at Café Luxembourg for an extremely chic and totally normal 4:30 p.m. dinner consisting of one ginger martini and one yellowfin tuna burger. The canary cover of Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! catches the eye of the guy two seats away, and he leans across the man between us—who has asked what I’m reading—to tell me how good it is.
We end up talking for at least an hour. I order two more drinks. I miss the showtime I intended to go to. I ask for his number clumsily before I leave for the next one. To play mahjong sometime, I say, referring to his reason for being on the Upper West Side. You can ask for my number for other reasons, you know, he tells me, and I feel a deep feeling of embarrassment, like I should be better at doing this, that I’m socially inept, that I have now rendered myself charmingly idiotic instead of just plain charming.
I go on a date with him the next week, after which he walks me home and, as he kisses me goodnight, picks me up and spins me around. I feel my body stiffen in his embrace. I feel instantly infantilized. I laugh nervously, bordering on hysterically. No one has ever tried to pick me up before, I tell him. He asks to come up to my apartment no fewer than three times. Each time I say no, not tonight, I have to be in office tomorrow. No, my apartment’s a mess. No. I simply just don’t invite men up on the first date.
When I meet up with him later that week to walk the High Line—trying to change my habit, I’m told, of being too quick to write people off, in favor of gathering more information—he tells me about the annual cosplay ball he attends in Los Angeles. He tells me he aspires to one day be an official card carrying member of the Fraternal Order of Real Bearded Santas, a professional organization for Santa impersonators who take their performances very seriously.
On the train home, I listen to the new Phoebe Bridgers song on endless repeat. Lost boys never grow up, never get old. Lost boys find me. It’s not her best, but I know what she means.
vi.
The day after Café Luxembourg, the air is still heavy and hot, even out of the city on Long Beach, but the water is still too cold. I wear a children’s rash guard that does nothing to actually warm me beyond a bit of a placebo effect. The waves are breaking too close to the stoney shore. A barrage of recent storms—or is it the rip tide? or a shortage of lifeguards? or just how things are working this summer?—sequester the enormous crowd of beachgoers in a small section of water between the jetties that they’ve demarcated with flags on the shore. When people naturally drift—the side effect of there being no real real way to enforce a strict line, no hard barrier or fence to pen you in, no real way to judge your proximity to a flag so far away—the lifeguards blow their whistles sharply.
Everyone in the water is packed in too close for any real fun, and there are too many children in front of me to catch a wave without plowing one, maybe even several, over. A reminder, I guess, that I am not a child, even though the beach has a kind of strange effect on me, like the second my feet hit the sand I’ve Freaky Friday’d with my younger self, and I’m 12 again and it’s time to go play. But I’m not 12. I’m just a small adult who looks incredibly stupid carrying a boogie board.
I paddle further out and drift lazily on the gentle slopes of just-cresting waves. Earlier that morning, shark sightings shut down Rockaway Beach all but entirely. Unbeknownst to me until later that evening, even closer, at Jones Beach, a shark bit a swimmer. The thought crosses my mind that even though I’m on a separate beach altogether, they’re of course out there, and probably swimming to surround me at this very moment. How stupid could I be, I think to myself, laying here, looking like a seal from underneath. I paddle back in. The boogie board sits behind my blanket for the rest of the afternoon.
At the end of the day, Alyssa and I go to a Mexican restaurant a few blocks from the train that is deeply mid at best. Our margaritas arrive in giant spritz goblets and, in taste, only vaguely resemble actual margaritas and my order of chicken tacos fall apart almost immediately upon their late arrival and when we get home later that night, Alyssa tells me that she left her bikini top in the bathroom when she was changing.
vii.
I let myself become a Minions person. I could go on here about how they are a leftist allegory or how they’re funny in an ironic way or how Minions and Monsters genuinely shocked me with its deep reverence for classic film, but I won’t. I am a Minions girl now and that is my truth and I will simply leave it at that.
viii.
Another week, another climate disaster to which we’ve grown numb. The morning sky is hazy, smoke from wildfires in Toronto making its way south. Perhaps because it’s not orange, like it was last time, few seem to really care. I wear a mask on the mile-long walk from the Bedford L to my office by the water, and when I stop in a bodega for a green juice, the woman at the counter asks if I’m sick. “No,” I tell her, “it’s just, well—” I gesture outside.
By the end of the day, it’s darker than it should be at 5 p.m. and my eyes sting and feel impossibly dry, but I don’t want to go back to Manhattan just yet. The thought of click-clacking, dissociated, through the liminal space that is the underground passage connecting the L at 14th and 6th and the sauna-like 1/2/3 platform at 14th and 7th feels too overwhelming. I sit at Sweetwater and have a dinner of two glasses of orange wine and perfectly salty, wilty french fries and read Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry for nearly two hours.
Later, at home, when I take my clothes off after a last-minute wildfire emergency Zoom with NYC-DSA’s Ecosocialists, my Commes des Garçons top smells like I spent all night roasting marshmallows.
ix.
A brief list of books, in addition to those mentioned above, I have read as I sit with a drink—rosé some days, lime seltzer others, on more than one occasion, a strange canned mocktail I couldn’t resist buying even though it ended up tasting repulsive—on a foam gardener’s kneeling pad I’ve placed on my stoney fire escape windowsill overlooking the street in the early evening hour, sometimes even as the sunset dims so much I have to turn on my phone’s flashlight to reach a stopping point:
Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff
Julie Buntin’s Famous Men
Mary H.K. Choi’s Pool House
Graydon Carter’s When the Going Was Good
Ann Patchett’s Whistler
James Joyce’s Ulysses (yes, still.)
I have responded to the viral reports in The New Yorker and The Atlantic about the growing literacy crisis with a furious desire to dig my heels into reading even more. I read voraciously these days, like I haven’t—embarrassingly—in some time, first slowed by the pandemic, then by the writing of my own first book. Once again, I feel like I did when I was 12, when I could not leave the house without a book to steal away with any chance I got, when I could not let a day go without one in my hands, always keeping something on the back burner (in this case, Ulysses) to pull out in the in-between time of finishing one thing and starting another. It feels so unbelievably good to slip away into a world of words, to disappear into a book, to let time completely evaporate as the pages turn.
“This is really so dorky,” I text my friend Phil, “but I love reading lol.”
x.
One of the genuinely embarrassing and surprising things about living in New York is how many years of unfazed numbness can be undone by one happy hour drink with friends on a beautiful summer evening.
I get frozen margaritas with Anya and Ben and we talk about their quick-approaching wedding. I feel myself overcome with warmth, not from the tequila, but just from the sense that I really do, genuinely, enjoy being in my Bobby era. Good and crazy people, my friends! Those good and crazy people, my married friends! And that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? That’s what it’s really about, really about!
The warmth still radiates an hour later as I step off the ferry at East 34th Street. I’m wearing heavy platforms that should direct me straight to the crosstown bus, or only as far as Bryant Park, but I head out on a long walk uptown anyway. In this golden hour light, one margarita on an empty stomach glow, Midtown East strikes me as charming. That this thought genuinely enters my mind surprises me; I’ve spent the majority of my time as a New Yorker declaring the East Side, in one sweeping generalization, to be “spiritually bankrupt” and “culturally evil.” But in the right light, at the right time, I can feel myself soften to the passing glimpses of the fantasy of New York in it. The New York of the past, in all its mid-century glory, the earnestness with which they built up the middle of Manhattan with architecture they thought was the future, all geometric shapes and rounded corners and glass terrarium ceilings. I pass the Ford Foundation with its tropical greenhouse lobby visible from the outside and take a picture. How, I ask myself, am I not supposed to love this?
That in Midtown East, of all places, I re-spark my Pollyanna-ish wonder and love for this glorious, terrible city, does not matter. And even though the sun is starting to set earlier and earlier, it is still summer in New York City, and how could I want to be anywhere else?
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