Do you ever find yourself missing random aspects of pre-pandemic life that you never even liked to begin with? |
It was sometime in late September, and I was standing in the kitchen of my childhood home eating pretzels for what seemed like the hundredth day in a row. My brother walked into the room, looked at me, grabbed a handful and said, “You know what I miss from before the pandemic? Water parks.” I listened as he went on to describe the feeling and joy of dried chlorine in nostalgic detail. When he finished, I realized with a sober humility that there was something strangely comforting in the image of the germy water park he had painted. |
How was I feeling wistful for something previously so unappealing to me? |
The more people I talked to, the more I realized that others felt similarly. A friend with a usually vehement disinterest in sports confessed a desire to attend a baseball game. People admitted that there was sometimes something nice about a seat on the subway preheated by a stranger, or camaraderie found in long women’s restroom lines. But it feels like maybe what we all miss more than the activities themselves is the possibility of those experiences. I wanted to see if I could capture that absurdity in an animated video, while also trying to get at the essence of our longing. |
 | | The New York Times |
|
When I first showed the script to the Opinion video team, I was surprised by their enthusiasm. I was afraid that the cabin fever had gotten to me for good. But the more time I spent exploring the outer limits of the animations and evocative potential of the sound effects, I realized that the absurdity of the piece gave language to the feeling of intense stuck-ness so many of us are experiencing; that my strange state of quarantine-induced mania wasn’t something to fight — it held a core truth that I wanted to share. |
Since the beginning of the pandemic, we’ve been yearning for a return to normal. But if you try to remember what typical life used to look like — when a trip to the grocery store was a chore and not an adrenaline-induced biweekly outing — it’s elusive. I think back to a year ago when the word “coronavirus” meant nothing to most of us, yet we still talked incessantly about the abnormal madness of American politics. Sometimes it’s hard to believe that we have always been living in unprecedented times. We strive for “normal” in the future, long for its abundance in the past, but it never seems to exist in the present. |
Forward this newsletter to friends … |
Here’s what we’re focusing on today: |
|
No comments:
Post a Comment