Sorry Mr. Toobin, You Do Not Have A Reservation
There may be a few too many things on the menu today.
So, you ever start something you are really excited about and then start to panic because your stupid brain is telling you that you are boring or lazy and there is no way you can maintain it? Why am I asking? No reason… Just wondering. And trying to channel this energy:
Welcome back to The Shitshow Room! Let’s start off with A Nice Thing: I just sent $500 from you to World Central Kitchen to help with their #ChefsForThePolls initiative. Thank you for being a founding member!
How are you doing today?
Here in The Shitshow Room, nearly everyone I know seems to be having a really rough few weeks. We’ve collectively seemed to have hit a wall. I even have found my traditionally deep love for autumn and the month of October to be covered in an itchy wool coat of dread. Maybe you feel it too? Worrying about a winter quarantined indoors, the number of Covid cases rising, the failure of public health organizations, a return to the days and nights of quiet streets only punctuated by the relentless sirens from ambulances. Worried about restaurants and the people who work in them and how everyone will fare when winter comes and outdoor dining is less appealing.
The New York Times ran an article the other day on the crisis of “pandemic fatigue” spreading around parts of the world. I must confess that it made me lie down on the floor and stare at the ceiling for about an hour when I read it. “With no end in sight, many people are flocking to bars, family parties, bowling alleys and sporting events much as they did before the virus hit, and others must return to school or work as communities seek to resuscitate economies. And in sharp contrast to the spring, the rituals of hope and unity that helped people endure the first surge of the virus have given way to exhaustion and frustration.”
It’s wild how for some, exhaustion and frustration means flouting public health regulations designed to protect you and others around you from catching a highly contagious, potentially deadly virus. My exhaustion and frustration tends to manifest things like in me never wanting to leave the house again or having a minor panic attack if I wake up with a tiny bit of a sore throat. For months, my Instagram feed has felt like I am peeping at another world, where there is no Covid. It makes me feel insane some days, and like I am an idiot for trying to be safe most of the time.
The Times also had this op-ed about not shaming people, which was disappointing because shaming people is where I am a viking.
Oh! And then there’s that little presidential election looming. For months, there’s been this drumbeat of a countdown. 40 days...25 days… 15 days. IT IS 15 DAYS AWAY. (Breathes into paper bag) How will it all go? How long will it all go on? (I regret to inform you that anyone who confidently tells you they know what is going to happen is not to be trusted. The only thing you can trust is nobody knows anything.)
For most of my adult life, I worked on election coverage. Around this time of the cycle, I would be stressed out about the how much the AP’s results cost and how they should look and which races are THE key races and what will be the process for calling winners and howthe staff schedule might look and who is in charge of ordering dinner for the newsroom … and what shall we eat?
It turns out that the work of planning stories and logistics and managing the chaos of breaking news provided me with a kind of bubble wrap for dealing with the existential dread of the Actual Things Happening in the news. I didn’t realize this until a year ago when I stopped working in breaking news and found it harder to cope with the bad things happening in the world when not distracted by whether the homepage will break and whether prewrites have been edited and how many pizzas to order. For a long time, my job provided me the type of comfort I might get when watching a horror movie and covering my face with my hands, but still peeking through my fingers during scary scenes.
Apart from the bottom dropping out of a problematic, but somewhat personally effective coping mechanism, one advantage to not working on the election coverage is that I do not feel compelled to watch the debates. Initially, this felt odd. Presidential debates are one of The Shitshow Room’s marquee events every four years. I know they served some purpose at some point, but they tend to be deeply frustrating to watch. Plus, they come on way too late at night.
I have felt for a while that the traditional presidential election cycle and the old-fashioned dance that candidates and the political parties and the media do from the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primaries to the party conventions to the big night itself doesn’t work anymore. It goes on for too long and normal people get burned out watching politicians and political journalists fight for years about who is electable and what strategy a person who hasn’t even formally declared their intention to run for president might employ in order to be elected. It has become like a scripted TV show that has run way past its prime, but no one has figured out what to put in its time slot. Everyone is carrying on according to a playbook that was drafted in the late 70s and 80s. It has been revised a few times to take cable news and the internet into some account, but somehow this has only made the presidential election cycle longer.
The already outdated Commission on Presidential Debates-run presidential debates seemed destined in 2020 to be particularly farcical given the current president’s tendencies to bully, lie, and ignore rules. (And then there’s the whole super-contagious virus that makes having people talking loudly at each other before a live audience problematic.) But the first debate was even somehow worse than everyone imagined. I didn’t watch it live—I caught up reading and watching clips the next morning— and somehow still felt like I was run over by one of those big trucks Trump is so fond of for the next 24 hours. I also didn’t watch the VP debate live—thank you for your service, those who did— and I really checked out of the whole so-called “Dueling Town Hall” mess as soon as everyone started calling it Dueling Town Halls. Maybe one thing Trump did accomplish as president was showing us truly how ridiculous these antiquated, election-cycle tent poles are? How do we fix this? I am not sure yet. That’s a special for another day.
So back to the initial question. How are you doing? How do you react when someone asks you that during This Time. Is it still the same, polite, “Fine and you?” Do you just sigh?
I sometimes respond in a too-loud bit of panicky laughter when people ask me. In very recent months, I will suddenly (and somewhat uncharacteristically) start quickly oversharing a list of my character defects and ailments and tales of klutziness no matter who I am talking to. “I cut myself cooking again and then tripped up the stairs. And then I got my period. …” My brain is horrified by my sudden confessionals, but I sometimes can’t stop. I suppose it is true that another side effect of the pandemic is that we are “all socially awkward now.”
“We are subtly but inexorably losing our facility and agility in social situations — whether we are aware of it or not,” Kate Murphy wrote last month. (Panicky laughter ensues)
Whenever I start reeling off my anxieties to anyone who isn’t my therapist, I immediately think of this bit from John Mulaney & the Sack Lunch Bunch, a special that premiered on Netflix in December and has been my number-one go to in recent months when it is late, I cannot sleep, and I need something to soothe me. If you haven’t watched it, stop denying yourself joy.
I’m going to punch out for now, but thanks for stopping by The Shitshow Room today! See you again soon!
SIDEWORK: Thank you for reading The Shitshow Room! You can sign up to receive it for free, but if you if you do decide to become a paying subscriber, $5 a month (or $50 a year), I will be donating half the proceeds each month to a few charities that help struggling food-service workers and Americans experiencing food insecurity. I will let you know when we make a donation, how much it is, and who we are helping. Our first donations will go to World Central Kitchen.
Follow me on Twitter: @lisatozzi or email lisatozzi@gmail.com