Under a disco ball the size of the moon, in a glass atrium opening its mouth to the blank gray night, besides strangers, I’m a girl with lungs again. I wear something short and tight and playful because, well, I’m here to play. To dance, to shoot pool and win, to catch fizzy water in my mouth. I’ve missed these bodies. I’m here for a good time.
I spent the last calendar year addicted to stress: a prestigious internship at a corporate behemoth, Data Structures in Java for the sport of it, an Instagram feed of eating diaries and workout tips. Fun and beauty were extraneous to my hustle quest. To hell with the pleasure of my curly hair routine. I was going to do my readings, troubleshoot code, and write a friendly-but-not-offensively-familiar marketing email in the hour between waking and walking to campus. This rhythm of ceaseless, all-consuming stress had its expected effects: shiny LinkedIn updates, mild hair loss, the vague promise of joy somewhere after all the work-noise—after This has passed.
But the continuity of COVID begs the question: when does This pass, really? What’s next? Is there a post-COVID, post-quarantine, post-This? I don’t say that to pessimistically resign ourselves to a perpetual public health crisis—we need the furious optimism, the belief in community care, the commitment to abiding by best practices to reduce harm—but to ask how we can make the present, the This-ness, more pleasurable, habitable. Quarantine productivity culture eradicated my sense of play, and the perpetual COVID limbo we continue to find ourselves in warns that we may have inadvertently slipped into a post-work/life balance culture. The thing about the corporate escalator is that once you’re on it, it will keep taking you up with it if you resign yourself to stillness.
So I ended My Year of Work and Anxiety sick with a flu that made me hallucinate, freshly out of a four-year relationship, packing my childhood bedroom into moving boxes, and unsettled by the creep of the realization that This was all there was going to be. And if This is it?
Well, if it’s This for the foreseeable future, then I want to have a good time here.
Reader: It’s playtime. Playtime as in KidSuper’s dynamic collection for
COVID has taken lives, if not cast brain fog, sapped taste, changed bodies, possibly permanently. For those of us lucky to have recovered from COVID, or evaded it entirely, the physical and psychic isolation imposed by years of waxing and waning public health crises is severe and worth grieving in its own right. For me, the durable fear about proximity and intimacy with strangers has been a striking, tragic effect of the unfortunately-named social distancing guidance Americans were prescribed. The insistence on maintaining productivity throughout the pandemic—home offices abound—meant that we lost the joy of community, but not the slog of work. Even crafty, playful activities like learning to crochet or painting a wall were so ceaselessly disseminated on social media that it’s a little difficult to imagine one could engage in these forms of leisure without also imagining sharing it, maybe monetizing it, riding the elevator going up that was TikTok 2020. Margaret Atwood writes of being your own voyeur, the man in your head watching you (un)dress. In 2020, I was the professor/boss/influencer in my own head: learning to make pasta or refinish wood furniture was pleasurable, yes, but I engaged in these activities tainted by the knowledge that such skills would serve as proof that I was not idle during the pandemic, that once This had passed, I would be improved. And that tug to forfeit leisure for productivity didn’t end with my first Pfizer vaccine, nor with the move back to New York and my community. We weren’t quite post-COVID yet, so why should I be post-COVID-productivity?
You can see the ease with which what began as a lonely quarantine coping mechanism became a furious, nonstop addiction to stress, deadlines, work, not to mention a genuine aversion to recreation. And with it came the abandonment of things I love: straining to play the Bm chord on my guitar, reading when I’m bored, getting dressed like my childhood hero Fancy Nancy. There are frivolous, pleasurable pursuits that don’t pad a resume or augment my intellect. Good! They’re forms of play. Play is about spontaneity, desire, and resistance to productivity. Play is playful, goddammit. And—embarrassing as it may be—I had forgotten how to yield to it.
I’m not alone, surely. There is something insidiously pre-professional about this university in the city of New York. A grid filled with offices of corporate giants who stretch their seductive claws (have you heard how much Amazon interns get paid?!) on Handshake and the like, it’s easy to see This as a waiting room for the career-to-come. On my particularly pessimistic days, I wonder if Columbia students know how to have fun at all.
But then I go to an IMO legendary lesbian party at EC, or see someone wear deliciously oversized Moon Boots with a mini skirt and lace tights, or let my friend Rosie Elliott describe their Movement Lab residency centered on that exact sense of spontaneity and anti-productivity that’s eluded me, and I remember that we are hungry, lovely, playful people, the whole lot of us.
Maybe playing is like riding a bike: easier as a child when you were braver in the face of knee-scrapes and leisure, but still, of course, possible. That surrender to the thrill of gravity pulling you forward, your shoelaces tangled and denim snagged in the spokes, sinking into the pleasure of something like stillness against the great velocity of capitalism.
Let’s go play.
Playtime Now //