week in joy

man these weeks go fast

Every time I sit down to write one of these, I marvel at how fast the week went. Wasn’t I just writing about cookies and cats last Monday? A week has passed? What the hell did I do, where did I go, what did I see? I feel like I spent the entire week in my house avoiding the heat and humidity outside and as such only watched baseball and listened to music.

But there were indeed little things in between the wins and losses, in between Slipknot and Simon & Garfunkel. I saw some gorgeous sunsets and spotted a downy woodpecker and got a really good haircut. It’s funny to look back and realize you had so many joys in a week that on the surface seemed mundane.

When I was a child, a good portion of my summer involved laying on a blanket underneath the expansive oak tree in our yard reading books. Once a week, I’d get on the library bus or meet the bookmobile down the block and check out about a dozen books of all kinds. Fantasies, adventures, biographies. Books on how electricity works and the moon landing. I seemed to care less about the subject and more about the act of reading, of escaping my boring world and entering one where anything could happen and often did. I can still feel that hot breeze that passed through the leaves of the oak, hear the sounds of the other kids in the pool or running through the sprinkler while I threw myself into my books.

I started a tradition many years ago of rereading the books of my childhood every summer. I get through each book in a matter of hours so it’s not very time consuming, but it is time well spent. The feeling I get from revisiting these books is intense and joyful. I get swept up in the same sense of magic and possibilities. I still get excited at the prospect of finding magic coins or a wardrobe that takes me to another world or spending the night in a museum. It’s one of my favorite things to do and I know I should carry this on during the rest of the year, but it feels right to keep it to summer to honor these memories.

The Olympics are back! I still kind of miss when both summer and winter olympics were every four years because that made the whole spectacle seem more special, but this way is fine, too. Getting up and watching rugby at 5am, spending the afternoon watching Simone Biles perform her magic, evenings catching up on what I didn’t see live, it’s all wonderful. I don’t have a lot of patriotic pride these days but when the Olympics come around I do tend to get a little “USA!” about them.

Speaking of tv viewing, I discovered this week that Amazon Prime has something called live tv, and it’s just blocks of programming of old tv shows and there is so much of it. By far my favorite thing was finding the “Kids in the Hall” channel where I immediately spent three or fours hours watching my favorite Canadian comedians perform hilarious sketch comedy.

There’s a Little House on the Prairie channel, an NHL channel, National Lampoon, SNL Vault, and the Repair Shop, which is an amazing, comforting show you should watch. I’m not a big tv watcher, but give me channels showing my old favorites and I am an absolute sucker for it.

So a while back, I decided to quit going to concerts. Most of the bands I want to see play small, standing only clubs in Brooklyn, and I became incapable of standing for that long without having to take off the next day. I hated going into Brooklyn and facing that drive home late at night, I hated going out in general. But things and times have changed to such a degree that not only am I back to going to shows, but I bought a ticket to go to a very local show alone (Microwave with a bunch of bands I’m excited to see)! I have never done anything like this and I’m a little nervous but also a little excited at the prospect of conquering the fear of doing anything on my own. I can’t believe I pulled the trigger and got the ticket. I’ll also be seeing Foxing in October and Jeff Rosenstock with Pup in August. I am so back.

A little programming note while I have you here: Starting this coming week, I will be doing a weekly column called Conspicuous Consumption, which will detail everything I’m listening to/reading/watching/eating/playing that week. Hopefully I can offer up some good recommendations for you, and you can feel free to recommend things I should listen to/read/watch/eat/play in the coming weeks.

That’s a wrap on this week. Hope yours was as lovely as mine, and that the week ahead brings you nothing but good stuff.