The Happiness That Attends Disaster

ISSUE #4

What a title, right? We're getting deep this week. Actually, it's because I just finished reading Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides for the first time, and this passage really struck me:

Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. [...] Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." I'd like to show how "intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members" connects with "the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age." I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants," as well as "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar."

It was a good book, and it's the reason Artie Shaw starts us off today, because in the story a young Milton Stephanides woos his future wife by sitting and playing "Begin the Beguine" on his clarinet through an open Detroit window in 1944.

That quote also speaks to what I love about playlists and mixtapes: they're Germanic train-car constructions of their own, with songs instead of morphemes. When you piece them together in the right way, you can express more complicated emotions than would've otherwise been possible. An Elliott Smith song you love means something different when squeezed between the Grateful Dead and "I'm Every Woman."

Of course, later in the book, the narrator takes it back when she sees the object of her desire fall in love without her: "I said earlier that most of my emotions are hybrids. But not all. Some are pure and unadulterated. Jealousy, for instance."

I feel that, but it's still too simple. So I built a train-car playlist to capture something that only gets worse as I get older: envy. Or, more specifically, the significant effort it takes to recognize envy and supplant it with love. Envy is often in disguise. Every time I think I know what I'm feeling — resentment, or sadness, or just an irritating itch behind the eye — it turns out, like in Scooby-Doo, to be unmasked every time as Old Man Jealousy.

I was inspired by this New York Times article, but it's also been coming up a lot lately. It has a positive correlation to the amount of times I open Instagram during the day. I could live at the bottom of a well as long as I didn't have Twitter. I'd be used to it, it'd be nice and quiet, and I like water. It's only when other people pass by to yell or spit or throw their pennies that I realize what I'm missing up there. Otherwise, I'd have been at peace.

It starts as a constructive impulse, a symptom of wanting to experience other people and expand your perspective. But the more you see from other lives, the more you cherry-pick what you want out of them, and the worse you feel about how little time you have. No one can be both a da Vinci and an Anna Wintour. A career just takes too long, most people are lucky just to have one. I can't even go bowling without checking out what's going on in the next lane over.

Anyway, this playlist is trying to coach the listener through that tug-of-war. You have a ton of good stuff in this one, split into two camps: the seething, and the forgiving. The seething being the great Fiona Apple, our reigning queen of resentment; the "still waiting" anxiety of the Talking Heads; and the woozy day-drunk of Lana. Then, while it's important to go through the rage, you gotta balance it out with some love and forgiveness - Danny Kaye and Shirley Bassey, but mainly Whitney Houston. I usually watch the single greatest vocal performance of all-time to help me get over it.

I hope I don't sound too much like an incel. It's too typical of privileged thought to curdle when you think the world owes you something, like Szechuan sauce, or a girlfriend, and all that is why we're in the shitty mess we're in today. Which is why it's important to recognize-and-adjust. I was following my inherited misogyny for a long time until I was walking home drunk one night with my college girlfriend and she inspired me to take Intro to Gender Studies. And that shouldn't be her job! How exhausting, to teach men all the time! We need better schools! But that's another essay entirely. For now, here's this.

**places needle on "Dancing Queen" and flies away holding a kite**

Oh, also, I saw Hop Along last night, and they are so perfect.

With love,

Jeff