Ways to Transcend
Get a crush, see a show, talk to yourself
Good morning everyone. I spent Sunday reading, writing this letter, and putting up the clay fridge magnets I made last week.
Today I’m talking about how to get out of your head/body/routine—something that I struggle with all the time. One of my favorite essays is “Joy” by Zadie Smith, where she describes a word often (mistakenly) synonymous with pleasure as a “strange admixture of terror, pain, and delight I have come to recognize as joy.” It isn’t necessarily a positive experience, but an intensely human one.
This week’s categories are Attend the SWEAT Tour, Design Homework, Habit Reset, On the Plane, and Crush.
A: Attend the SWEAT Tour
On Monday, I took the train to New York to see Charli xcx and Troye Sivan’s joint SWEAT Tour. I had seen both artists once before (Troye’s Blue Neighborhood tour in 2016, Charli when she opened for Taylor Swift’s reputation stadium tour in 2018), before their musical and commercial peaks. SWEAT felt like an adrenaline-filled dance party with all of my favorite songs. Smith writes in her essay about going to London’s Fabric club in 1999:
“I was terrified I might die, yet I felt simultaneously overwhelmed with delight that “Can I Kick It?” should happen to be playing at this precise moment in the history of the world. I took the man’s hand. The top of my head flew away. We danced and danced. We gave ourselves up to joy.”
At the concert, Addison Rae came on in the middle of the show and sang Diet Pepsi in a white tutu. I kept thinking about where she started—in Louisiana, making TikTok dance videos in her bedroom—and how she ended up on stage in a sold-out arena. Sure, the internet is vacuous and mind-numbing, but I was in a real room with thousands of real people and all of them were ecstatic, jumping, screaming along to the song. And then LORDE APPEARED to sing Girl, so confusing and I almost exploded.
I consume so much highly produced and polished content that the concert was a reminder of the flesh and blood that is behind every Pop Star. I saw the sips of water they took, their departures into backstage tunnels, and the beads of sweat (!) collecting on their faces.
D: Design Homework
My graphic design homework for this week was to find a poster in the wild, then redesign it by photocopying, cutting, and gluing pieces of it together. I was nervous about the knife-work because I had just sliced my thumb open trying to cut up an apple. ANYWAY, last morning, I found a poster on an outdoor bulletin board advertising $800 custom class rings with Yale insignias.
I then spent two hours in an art school lab playing with the copy machine’s print settings, cutting out slivers of paper, and rearranging them on a new poster. I worked to the quiet humming of the machine. I didn’t have a plan, other than that I wanted to duplicate and invert the rings, and make the composition less cluttered. Mostly I progressed by iterating and deciding what I wanted to keep and throw away. I’m now very fond of the genius invention that is an electronic photocopier, and the small room that felt like a temporary sanctuary.
H: Habit Reset
This year, I moved to the second floor and got blessed with three big bay windows. The unexpected consequence is that every morning, light pours in through my very flimsy blinds. As of yesterday (thanks to my dad), I have IKEA blackout shades, but my body clock has already adjusted to waking up with the sun. Every morning I get up at 7:45am. It feels a bit sneaky, like stealing hours that I wasn’t supposed to have. I make a matcha, take a long time to get ready, and read. I hate the male influencers who wake up at 4am to work out and start their productive time way earlier than everyone else to get ahead. But I do see the value in waking up early. It’s an untouched couple hours to spend with myself.
O: On the Plane
On long flights, I sometimes go without any form of stimulation. It doesn’t start on purpose. The movies don’t look good enough to commit to. I forgot to download my playlists offline. I don’t want to pay for wifi. It’s too dark to read. I find it difficult to sleep non-horizontally.
It feels meditative, though, to be sitting upright in a squished economy seat, listening to the plane buzz through the air. I love planes because they force you to be unproductive without guilt. Nothing is expected of me but to sit and wait. Also, I was doing this before the internet started talking about these men “raw-dogging flights,” which I think is a horrible term.
The summer after my freshman year of college, I listened to podcasts whenever I left the house. If I was walking, or taking the train somewhere, there was dead space I should be taking advantage of to get smarter. I listened to podcasts about investing, cryptocurrencies, psychology, fashion, the news. Many of them were scripted like rambling class lectures, while others were more conversational, though I think the hosts had infinitely more fun than me. I didn’t learn much.
I don’t listen to podcasts much anymore. Sometimes I’ll play music when I’m walking around campus, but I have grown to like the silence and the clarity it provides.
C: Crush
Anaiis and I have hosted a show on Yale’s radio station for 4 years now. Our latest episode was on CRUSHES, which we agreed are simultaneously incredible and excruciating. I’ve had crushes that are so all-consuming that everything else in my life seems negligible. I asked Anaiis if she’d like to add anything:
“Unattainable. Debilitating. Stream Crush by Ethel Cain. A + B forever and ever and ever.”
My favorite song about having a crush right now is Risk by Gracie Abrams, because it is ridiculously overdramatic and anxious but also filled with humor and possibility.
I’m ending this letter, as it started, with Smith.
“We certainly don’t need to be neuroscientists to know that wild romantic crushes—especially if they are fraught with danger—do something ecstatic to our brains, though like the pills that share the name, horror and disappointment are usually not far behind. But what a wonderful thing, to sit on a high wall, dizzy with joy.”
Talk to you next week!
After I started working, waking up at 7:45am is sleeping in 🥹
having a crush makes life worth living fr