Sixty-Nine Cents

CN: Descriptions of not having to work for a couple months, sort of

I’m not sure there’s anything I do with such gratitude in the moment, other than snuggle my child, as drink a fountain diet coke. Today’s came from Costco—a diet pepsi, to be fair—a treat to trick myself into leaving the house for errands that have needed to happen for a while now. But now the errands are done and I am home and in addition to my sense of accomplishment, I have most of this fountain diet coke.

I got home with my diet coke and looked at my phone for a while. It’s 2:44 on a Thursday afternoon, but all I thought was, how long should I do this for? Not, I need to stop. Not, I have too many other things to do. Just, I wonder when I ought to stop. It’s the first day of the first real summer break I’ve had in I’d say over two decades.

Tracing backwards: Last summer I taught an online class, the ten or so summers before that I wasn’t teaching so it was just normal work. In grad school I worked and interned. Then a bunch of regular work years before that. In college I was always doing something in the summer, maybe not wisely or for income—I did a lot more summer acting programs than useful internships—and in high school I was nearly full-time at Barns & Noble. I worked one summer in the equipment shed at a summer camp because I applied too late to be a counselor. The summer after seventh grade I did filing at a doctor’s office. Before that, I went to day camp, but my sense of work and leisure and responsibility, honestly, didn’t really exist yet at all.

So this is maybe, then, the first ever summer for me of its kind. A teacher’s summer, a professor’s summer. Dare I say it, a writer’s summer? Basically, the part-time work I was supposed to have this summer fell through, but not in a financially ruinous way, so I’m just… going to Costco in the middle of a Thursday and waxing poetic about soda.

There is, as ever, plenty to do. There is writing, there is reading (for the writing and for the broader edification of the writer and enrichment of the writer’s soul), there is laundry, there are eight million closets that could stand to be cleaned out, there is syllabus prep for the fall, there is my reading for The Best American Science and Nature Writing, which I might for once start before November, there is the week between the end of preschool and the start of summer camp. But there has always been all that and also somewhere between one and five jobs.

It feels a little like letting go of diet culture for the first time. You mean I can just eat whatever I want? Well, yes, and you should, but you also will realize that “whatever I want” turns out to not be what you expected. If I felt like I could eat Doritos whenever I wanted I’d finish a whole bag! And you might, once or twice, until you realize (in your soul and body, not your brain) that when you can eat Doritos whenever you want, you don’t ever need to eat the whole bag, because you can just have more tomorrow. Maybe the whole bag gives you a stomach ache, maybe not. Maybe once in a while you’ll eat the whole bag anyway. But it’s always fine.

I would love to come to the same place of balance with work and focus and looking at my phone. Looking at my phone is addictive but so is Doritos. I wonder how much total free reign I’d have to give my phone addiction before it stopped feeling seductive, before I looked at its screen and thought, eh, and went and read a book instead.

Wait.

I just realized I have literally actually done this, today, just now, I was looking at my phone and thought, I want to write a newsletter. Or rather, I thought, I love fountain diet coke so much and I want to start a newsletter with that.

I spend so many of my waking hours in a battle with my own attention, the way I used to spend time fighting my own desires for food. I think I’m bad, weak, addicted, lazy, worse than everyone else I know. The difference, of course, is you can’t quite food cold turkey, you need it, so your only other option is to heal and make peace. I could throw my phone in the toilet right now and not threaten my physical wellbeing. But I would miss it, would miss all the friends who live in there, in discord and instagram dms.

You can’t quite ever turn off the shoulds of life the way you can with food. I can eat Doritos for a week and survive. I cannot shirk all my family and home responsibilities for a week without courting much more disaster than a stomach ache. (Yes parenthood is tangled up in all of this, the loss of the possible weekend reset of utter sloth to steel yourself against the shoulds of the week.) What you eat is just your relationship with yourself. I can’t tell my kid, Sorry, I’m doing “intuitive living” right now and not make his lunch, not play with him, not drive him to school.

So I post a picture of the lunch I’ve made to instagram, to turn it into something I like doing, maybe a small point of connection with a couple of distant friends. Or a bid for dopamine when a couple of those distant friends throw it a like.

I’d love for this summer to be an experiment in intuitive attention, just doing the work I want to work, seeing when my brain might crave the attention equivalent of a salad. I know what it means to truly want to write. I sort of know what it feels like to truly want to do laundry. But not to fold the laundry, never that.

I’d also love to get to rest, to reset. I live three minutes from Costco, I’d get so many 69-cent fountain diet pepsis there if the parking lot weren’t such a nightmare. I’d love to throw my phone in the toilet and remember what it means to lose myself in a book. I’d love to live in one city with all the far-flung friends who live in my phone. Portland, Providence, New York, the other Portland, all condensed to one walkable neighborhood. Maybe we’ll go to the drive-in one summer night to watch TikToks all together on the big screen, while our kids run around chasing fireflies. I’d love that. I’d love a lot of things.