Lately I have been remembering times when I was joyful, and wondering if I will ever feel joyful again. I’m not going to say that I know I’m being ridiculous, because that might jinx my shot at future joy, but I will admit to being sucky. Right now we are all being sucky, because it’s March rather than June, and cold rather than hot like it was last week. March is the time of year when you fixate on memories from last summer as though they’re loved ones you left behind to go fight in a war. The war of feeling a little bit colder than usual and not being able to go to the beach.
But summer memories are skewed by the fact that things are 75 per cent funner, on average, in hindsight. For example, last summer I went to Montreal for a few weeks. I mostly worked and occasionally walked, but to remember it feels like I was in Heaven and then got called back down to Earth to work the night shift at a box factory. I listen to songs I listened to then and literally start crying. That’s not meant to be poignant. It’s meant to demonstrate just how sucky the dregs of winter can make a person. It’s also meant to remind myself that I’m crying over not being in a city that I was in just last week, except with temperatures fifteen degrees lower than ideal.
I can’t make the weather nicer, or even guarantee that it will ever be nice again, but I can call sour grapes and pretend that joy actually sucks. Here are a few summery things that I desperately want to do, along with reasons why they are probably not as good as I think they are.
RIDE MY BIKE ALONG A BEAUTIFUL LAKE
In summer, I like to ride my bike along the Martin Goodman Trail and look out onto the beautiful lake, all dappled with sunlight. What I’m forgetting is that when you bike, you have to look at the road ahead of you. When you’re on the trail, the road ahead of you is filled with parents with strollers who for some reason would rather walk on the bike path than on the boardwalk. It’s also full of goose shit. If you gawk too long at the beautiful water, you will maim a parent and get shit all up in your tires. Which means that as long as you’re in motion, you are required to look at something unpleasant.
BE A FREE SPIRIT
Last summer, I had a great night where I rode along the bike trail with some friends in the dark, then up to the pool at Christie Pits, which was almost as crowded as during operating hours. What I’m filtering from this anecdote is the fact that a) the bike path was not just dark but pitch black, and I was terrified the whole time of crashing into a tree; b) to hop that pool, we had to scale a giant black fence in our bare feet, and the entire memory is tainted by the worst-case-scenario image of myself impaled on a metal spike in front of a bunch of naked revellers. A lot of the things you do in summer could easily get you killed or arrested, and who knows? This summer your luck could finally run out.
FEEL WARM ALL THE TIME
Summer is never really summer if you work in an office, because buildings always crank the AC until it feels like winter. Once you get outside, your body temperature is so low from the AC that it takes you two hours to feel warm again, and by then the air is cooling. You are probably warmer on the whole in the winter if you work in an office.
ATTEND A BARBECUE WITH ALL MY FRIENDS
When you picture yourself at a barbecue during barbecue off-season, you’re not actually picturing yourself at a barbecue. You’re picturing Jughead at a barbecue, shovelling down burgers and frankfurters and not even getting full. In reality, you have two burgers at a barbecue and then feel too full to do much of anything, including dance on the lawn or make small talk with the strangers who look boring but are sitting right beside you. Another thing that happens to you at barbecues, but not Jughead, is beer. Since barbecues start in the afternoon, by 11 you’re either incredibly sick, or useless for the rest of the night. Meanwhile, all the smart folks who ate a salad at 7 and waited until go-out time to go out are having a blast on someone’s rooftop.
FINALLY HAVE THAT MOMENT I IMAGINED WHEN I LISTENED TO THAT SONG
All I do all winter is listen to songs that remind me of summer. They evoke summery activities and I always promise myself that when summer comes, I’ll do whatever activities the songs evoke while playing the songs. This is almost always disappointing, because songs are about 3 minutes long. That means months of anticipation for 3 minutes of revelry, and by then the pressure to revel hard is so great that the stress nullifies the joy. What also nullifies the joy is your friends not caring about how perfect the song is for the moment, because chances are they’re not even that into the song.
That’s if you even remember to play the song in the first place. At my best friend’s cottage a few years ago, in the motorboat speeding toward the mainland on Sunday evening, I remembered how happy it would make my winter self to hear a certain song at that exact moment. So I scrambled for my earbuds, but they were all tangled up, and by the time I untangled them the motorboat was 45 seconds away from the dock. I could barely hear the song over the sound of the motor and my friend laughing at me because she knew how hard I was trying to have a moment.
JUST SIT BACK AND ENJOY THE SEASON
One thing you forget when the weather’s not great is how much great weather is wasted worrying about how much great weather is left. By July, everyone is talking about how summer is almost over. By August, everyone is bummed out about the end of summer, and by the beginning of September, summer has been declared dead. I don’t share in this kind of fatalism, I assure you. But it does make me angry, and so summer for me is ruined by anger.
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Alexandra Molotkow writes about life and stuff for Toronto Standard. Follow her on Twitter at @alexmolotkow.
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