Are we still finding joy?

vote, or whatever, I guess

I tried many times over the summer to find the motivation to finish one of the newsletters I started. They all had the same theme: I am tired of cooking, I am tired of eating, I am tired of living in my body and maintaining it.

I have been depressed, to some extent, for most of my life I think, certainly most of my life 15 and up, which is about as much as I can remember. I take anti-depressants, not so much so that I am not depressed, because that never goes away, but because 20 mg of Fluoxetine a day keeps me from thinking about killing myself on a daily basis. Hey, we all have to find what works for us! This is all to say, obviously, I am depressed right now. Who isn’t? But doesn’t it feel like an extra twist on our usual depression? Doesn’t pandemic/the continuous refusal of the government to give a shit about the lives of black people/environmental catastrophe depression just feel a little unique? Aren’t we all experiencing a little extra soupcon of dread because of …. whatever is going on this week.

This summer I wrote drafts about how I was sick of perfectly ripe tomatoes, how I was turning all of the CSA produce I had into pesto, and how I was going through phases where all I was willing to eat was zaru soba. I didn’t send any of them out, because everything that I wrote and everything that I ate seemed like a struggle, none of it seemed worthwhile.

The pandemic has taken a lot of things from a lot of people. Maybe that’s why it feels so particularly pointless. I go out once a week and I meet my neighbors who need access to food, and we never have enough. Every week people get angry because we run out of food before we can give any to them. I have done this for months, and, well, maybe there’s something there. Maybe it feels fucking ridiculous to write about food when my neighbors are hungry. Maybe it feels even more absurd to think, as I do, day after day, that I am tired of eating. I am tired of cooking. I don’t want to be responsible, I don’t want to maintain myself, my apartment, my job.

Maybe I’m just tired of feeling responsible for my community, for my city, for elections, for the health of the nation, for everything big, and broad and important. I want someone else to be responsible for these things for a while. I want the mayor and the governor not to fight like children, because they are the mayor and the governor because they wanted to be responsible for the state. I am happy to help out in my community, but at the same time, our survival should not depend on private donations, and the ability to get food one week from Coney Island and another week from Sunset Park, and fuck, can’t somebody else do this? Yes, we keep us safe, but goddamnit, I don’t want to keep us safe, I want us to be safe. I’m not saying “if we had elected HRC we could be at brunch right now,” but I am saying that god DAMN it would be nice if the people who were put in power cared at all about the well-being of people. I’m saying it would be better for everybody if none of us ever had to wake up at 5AM to go do ICE watch, to try to keep people from being deported.

But even as I am sick of cooking most of the time, as I don’t want to think about the routine maintenance of myself, I find myself cooking more and more elaborate meals. Every few weeks I seem to fully lose my mind and dedicate myself to cooking as much as humanly possible in one day, and then I try not to think about it anymore.

I am angry that something that once brought me joy is now an endless drudgery. I want to eat har gow, and I don’t want to make it. But I also don’t want to take the dang bus to sunset park and then eat har gow outside when it’s like, 40 degrees and incredibly windy.

This is to say, I guess I’m going to try to make har gow tomorrow, and also this cake, and who knows what else. Is something happening tomorrow? I don’t know, I have the day off work for some reason, I can’t think of why, so I’m going to destroy my sinuses making chili oil, and then drive myself to distraction trying to shape dumplings, something that I am not good at doing. Trading one futile task for another, I guess.