Happy November to All Who Celebrate
It's Evermore Season <3
Hello!
Welcome to November, the season of shorter days and seasonal colds, set to the tune of Taylor Swift’s folk-pop phase. God’s gift to late autumn.
While I’ve been pleased to discover that this time of year in Hanoi is sunny and 75 (I’m such an asshole), I retain the muscle memory of spending many a November in northern Minnesota. In Duluth, the November ground is squishy from snow that won’t stick and the sky is an uncompromising grey. You’re hot in your least flattering coat and freezing in your itchiest sweater. There’s nearly nothing to do. It’s terrible until you realize that it’s kind of wonderful.
For me, a northern November releases the sadness that has been secreted away in my bones through months of sunshine and daylight. Melancholia finally has room to stretch after a long summer’s nap, and, at the risk of sounding like a Tumblr post, it’s extremely relieving. It’s indulgent-sad, present-sad, restorative-sad. It’s sadness about everything but mostly nothing in particular. In an article for Repeller titled “Why Do I Love to Feel Blue”, Nora Taylor shares this sentiment. She confesses to hating summer for it’s constant sun and the pressures to frolic. She goes on to make the important differentiation between this “good” sadness and depression:
“To be clear, the melancholia I love is not the same as the minor depression I sometimes experience. When I’m depressed, it’s so much more than “feeling sad.” My emotions are flat, and I feel distant from the things that normally bring me joy. It’s not something I can simply “snap out of,” and I want to make it clear that I’m not conflating the two. When I’m in my ideal melancholic state, I’m very present in my feelings. I turn on music, I eat a piece of toast, I consider writing poems.”
While I have yet dare to write a poem, I relate to the inclination to let myself be a sad girl, savoring morsels of bland food and relishing in the dull pre-winter light.
In 2015, The School of Life released a delightful lil’ YouTube explainer titled “On Feeling Melancholy” in which they describe the sensation as one of “grasping the things that make life challenging”. Amidst the comments praising the video for explaining such a common feeling was one comment that just read “This made me cry…. I don’t know why”.
Our dumb little lives are full of reasons to cry and excuses not to. Or if you’re not much of a crier (which I’m not), excuses to find silver linings. November strips away some of the ~Forced Family Fun~ of warmer months and allows space for more varied emotions. This has never been more true for me than last November.
Of course, unless you’re an apathetic stone person, we all have our own version of that heavy, sinking, shit feeling brought on by Fall 2020.
At first, it didn’t seem so bad! It couldn’t. The beginning of COVID in the U.S. coincided with winter melting into spring in Washington D.C. and school wrapping up for me and the three friends I was living with. There was a novelty to the lockdown restrictions and the news was so hard to comprehend that it just sat on the top of my brain like whipped cream that has yet to sink into hot chocolate. I had unlimited time to read the Sunday New York Times that came to the door every week. The new “At Home” section was filled with sweet, uplifting Times New Roman content about embracing the changes together.
Our household would cut out the illustrations of families and young people smiling through life indoors and tape them on the wall near our dining table, where my friend Natasha would serve us elaborate home cooked meals every Sunday.
Every day it got warmer. It was stoop sitting season, Lorde season, going on long runs with my mask on and waving haughtily at fellow masked-athletes season. I fostered cats. Beyond the threshold of my little life were the lived experiences of pain that I heard about on The Daily, but they had not reached lil’ old us, besides the long grocery store lines. I, and surely many of my fellow New York Times readers, was blinded by finding silver linings, drunk from shotgunning the bright side. When I eventually drove home for summer in Minnesota, I shoved 1989 vibes into my head as I passed closed restaurants and an eerily abandoned Wisconsin Dells.
That summer, I became obsessed with finding fulfillment in the still and antisocial lifestyle required of being a Good, Ethical Pandemic Person. I didn’t miss my friends, I was savoring time with my parents. Nothing could reach me from my reading perch in my mom’s garden, not even the dark feeling I got when the thought of my mom coming down with a fever snuck into my mind. Lake Superior washed away the darkness. I swear that in my memory, it didn’t rain a single time last summer. It couldn’t have.
Back in D.C. in August for an online senior year I had convinced myself I felt VERY good about, I filled my days with little charms to make the situation feel quaint. I clung to early fall weather with my joyous jazz hands.
But as the days grew shorter through September and October, my ability to maintain the facade of high spirits was waxing and waning. The highs (hikes in Shenandoah, roommate adventures, wearing my outfits) were higher ever, but the stakes were becoming clear. I became increasingly aware that under it all, I was…. sad. In moments that there wasn’t room for silliness and fun, like when I was knee deep in my Econ textbook preparing for a test, I would remember that COVID cases in Minnesota were higher than ever. So, I would stop studying and watch the Bachelor instead.
My Grandmother got COVID and while I knew I was objectively sad, I had spent so little time allowing myself that feeling that I just felt numb to it. My friends who lost loved ones didn’t say much about it. I think we all felt like we weren’t allowed to be sad. We drank and watched Hairspray and sang along.
By Thanksgiving, the air too damp and chilly for outside Whiteclaws and with a weird Christmas approaching, I didn’t have much left. Edie invited Zoe and I to her home in Maine for Turkey day, but it was impossible for any of us to feign cheer over Thanksgiving in the backroom, out of breathing distance of anyone over age 40. Cases in the U.S. were climbing and climbing.
Back in D.C., even the foster cats weren’t hitting the same.
I drove home the next week, for no reason in particular other than it seemed like the next best thing to do. Hauling my limp body through Iowa and Southern Minnesota, I felt an unexpected comfort in the empty, unjoyful November landscape. The only food open when I felt hungry for dinner was Kwik Trip, and I shed my first stupid indie tear in quite some time over a gas station hot dog<3. I was alone and there was nothing in that moment to pretend to be jolly about and it felt so good. It was melancholy in it’s purest form, the chance to admit that everything was actually not how I wanted it to be.
A week or so later, Taylor Swift released Evermore and I listened to it in one go during a slippery gray walk through my favorite Duluth park. As I write this, I’m giggling at how ridiculous I sound. But that album was magnificently sad! Not just in the obvious ways but in the details. In summer, when I was still looking for silver linings, Taylor gave us folklore, the sad-but-kind-of-actually-fun big sister of evermore. Come late fall, she abandoned all coziness and cuteness and gave us the chilly melancholy songs that we, well at least I, needed.
Today, I find that evermore still captures exactly what November feels like, the chance to recognize sadness, put a name to it, and let it go. But one line in particular, from the popular track “no body, no crime”, is lodged in my brain permanently forever until I die. It is the reason I started digging myself into this depressing newsletter topic in the first place.
As you well know, “no body, no crime” is a murder ballad featuring HAIM. Taylor sings from a narrator’s perspective about a friend, Este, who she believes was killed by her no good cheating husband after discovering his infidelity (see: “that ain’t my merlot on his mouth”). The whole song paints excellent, dark vignettes of truck tires and life insurance policies. And at 1 minute and 25 seconds into the song, Taylor drops the most fascinating detail of all.
Este wasn’t there
Tuesday night at Olive Garden, at her job, or anywhere.
My initial reaction to the fact that she set part of this sad story in an Olive Garden restaurant was that it was utterly genius. Pure lyrical gold. I am not joking in the slightest when I say that that one line spoke directly to the melancholy November I was indulging in. But I didn’t know why. It was just one of those perfect lyrics at the exact right time. I scoured The Internet for someone who felt the same.
Aside from this hilarious Reddit thread, I was disappointed. Now, Taylor Swift has confessed to Entertainment Weekly that she only chose that location because it is Este Haim’s favorite chain restaurant. But I know it is more than that, and after thinking about it for one calendar year, I figured it out.
.
When I lived in Racine, Wisconsin as a wee child, my dad would commute my brother and me 40 minutes to Milwaukee for ballet class every Tuesday. The drive was boring and ballet class was cold. And I was bad at it. But I pretended I liked it because I asked to go and my Dad was nice enough to make it happen. The only silver lining of the venture was when the three of us would go to our favorite affordable family Mexican restaurant for dinner before heading home. But sometimes, when La Perla was closed or full, we would head for home and hope for a dinner spot along the way. In suburban Wisconsin, this invariably meant Olive Garden.
Have you been to an Olive Garden lately? I’m not trying to be mean but it’s very depressing there. The pasta is a little more expensive than you want it to be, clocking in at around $20.00 a plate after tax and tip. You can do the unlimited soup and breadstick thing, but the charm of that wears off quickly. Sitting down with my dad and brother on a dark weeknight, I always felt that uncomfortable kid feeling of “I can’t explain it but none of us are having a good time right now”. But you’re already seated and there’s water in front of you. And after all, when you’re there, you’re family and you don’t dip on family before ordering.
In Middle School, after moving to Duluth and befriending my little prepubescent girl gang, America’s favorite chain Italian restaurant resurfaced. Once or twice a year, my 12 year old besties and I would decide to have a girls night dinner, which involved dressing up in cheap Charlotte Russe dresses and having someone’s poor mom drop us off at Olive garden and pick us up two hours later. Armed with allowance cash we would order cheese ravioli from waitresses who hated us. Someone would be seated at the end and feel left out. Somebody would have only brought enough money to cover 80% of their tab. Someone would be grumpy that their mom made them wear leggings under their dress and sneak to the bathroom to take them off. That person was me.
Since those formative Olive Garden experiences, I’ve sometimes passed an Olive Garden on a drive and wondered what it would be like to go in, sit down, and order a glass of wine and a Spaghetti Carbonara. I imagine the fluorescent lights and the fake plastic grapes. I can hear the chatter of office happy hour and parents trying to restrain unwieldy kids. I resist the thought and instead spend my dollars at trendier, more “fun” establishments.
Olive Garden is the restaurant manifestation of November. It is where you end up when you can’t pretend to be happy anymore, when you need a corner booth to slump into and admit that things are not awesome right now. When you’re sick of the happy face put on by local eateries and farm to table spots and you crave mediocre noodles.
Olive Garden lets you admit to yourself that you hate ballet and one day you’re going to have to tell your dad. It’s realizing that in life it is inevitable to let your parents down sometimes. It is wallowing in that and accepting it. Olive Garden let’s you notice that your parents aren’t made of money and that’s why your family always prefers to go to La Perla. Olive Garden is accepting that you want to be 20 but you’re actually 12, you don’t have freedom or money and you are still growing into your body. Your best friends can hurt your feelings and it’s not even their fault.
It was melancholy in it’s purest form, the chance to admit that everything was actually not how I wanted it to be.
I adore the idea that Taylor Swift feels the same way. That she knew what she was giving me when she released evermore last year, her second full album of 2020. A chance to walk on icy ground in a grim November and feel the weight of the year. This November, even though it’s sunny and 75, I can feel that indulgent melancholy when I put in Taylor and close my eyes. And I am so grateful for it. If you catch me doing this, or dining alone at an Olive Garden, please don’t cheer me up. I’m having a moment.
Anyways!! Some bullet points:
Ellie and I have been reading A Streetcar Named Desire aloud and I could not recommend that activity more. You really get a chance to perfect an accent, for better or worse. You can find a free PDF of the play here.
I told you guys last week that I didn’t like Dune that much but I am completely changing my tune. It is so good.
I hope you are all doing well and getting excited to consume Turkey in a couple of weeks :-) We have committed to throwing a Thanksgiving dinner in our apartment, which is a disaster waiting to happen. I wouldn’t wish the meal we are about to cook on my worst enemy.
ALL my love AND MORE to you and yours -
Ryley