JanuWeary

January is a non-negotiable 495 days long every year, particularly if you live north of the Equator, especially if you live in the American Northeast. The Julian calendar is a lie and so is the New Year. You are still stuck with yourself and the bleak atmosphere of January. 

December? December is Mary Poppins as your babysitter, all your needs met and your booboos kissed and your trees topped with sparkly angels, and January is the month when Mary Poppins blows away, gripping her snowy white parasol, and the only person who’s left to babysit you is Boo Radley who doesn’t know any jokes or games and just likes to sit in the corner and peer creepily out the window, waiting for this all to end.

I am not made for January. Thinking about it reminds me that Heaven is a place with unlimited cookie dough and an endless December. January is a box with a gray lid, and within the box is one of those plastic trays segmented by little compartments for various chocolates with mystery fillings. Only in the January box, there is no chocolate nor mystery. Rather, each little pod contains items you collect in January: overpriced gym memberships, kale chips, self-loathing.

Here is a list of good things that happen during January if you live in the American Northeast: 

1. We remember Martin Luther King, Jr. and his legacy.

2. We get a day off work/school to remember Martin Luther King, Jr. and his legacy.

3. The Golden Globes are an event that happens in California and also on television if you have cable. 

4. We then get to enjoy the Fashion Recap after the Golden Globes.

5.  Some things go on sale. Like cars you don’t want to drive in January. Or TVs you don’t want to haul home in January. 

That’s it. The complete bucket of January joy poured out. (But be sure to toss salt on it or else it will turn to ice.)

It seems the only people who are happy in January are Zumba instructors. They get to be inside and elevate their frothy endorphins while doing a hip-hop dance that I will try to follow but invariably just grapevine my way into a deranged Macarena.

Besides Zumba instructors, there is another human living in the American Northeast who does not struggle with the Jans/Febs. 

I live with this human. His name is Husband. Husband is relentlessly chill. In fact, where hardship and woes are concerned, he is an all-around cool customer. I am told this is the mark of his birthright as a Canadian (show me a Canadian who is not earnest, I dare you), so even-keeled and fair-minded. This explains most of his immunity to the Jans/Febs.

There is another reason, though, that has nothing to do with his natural disposition and everything to do with his upbringing which was largely devoid of holidays, celebrations, birthday cakes, and all the trappings of my girlhood steeped in Americonsumerism. Where my December was a cozy hearth with stockings hung on the mantle, Husband’s was, you know, just a regular mantle, probably with the music stand he set up in front of it so his parents would believe he had actually practiced his violin (instead of watching “Days of our Lives” as was his weekday practice). He had no holiday letdown growing up and therefore he just soldiers into the barren month of January without expectation. Whereas my January is a snowglobe with snowflakes swirling around a bottle of anti-depressants and a lost mitten, Husband’s is a snowglobe with a peaceful tableau reminiscent of a Thomas Kinkade painting before they were mass produced by underlings.

Do you know anyone who has none of the post-holiday funk, none of the snow-capped mountain highs of the holiday season and none of the deep valley lows of the daunting new year? Isn’t it a little curious? What is there even to talk about in January if not lamentation? Perhaps I am getting the chorus wrong here, though, because Husband is the son of immigrants whose entire lives have been one, long, strong lamentation. His parents did their darndest to build a better life for their sons in a country that was as foreign in its culture, language and traditions as they could possibly imagine. They were not concerned whether they were going to have to pay express shipping on the shearling bathrobe they had embroidered with a monogram. They were interested in paying their rent and not being deported. That has a way of informing a boy who becomes a man who understands what a real crisis is. A crisis, contrary to what my Jans/Febs contend, is not Sephora running out of my favorite--actually, no crisis involves the word “Sephora.” Forget I ever mentioned it.

Much as I’m inspired by Husband’s non-subscription to the holiday and post-holiday tectonic shifts, I’m not really sure what to do with myself in this partnership. The balance in mental health tilts so far it hits the ground on my side of the marital teeter-totter after New Year’s Day. I can’t transpose his upbringing onto mine, nor would I want to; I can’t trade glasses and see it all anew. Ann Voskamp already stole my idea to write 1000 happy thoughts down and emancipate herself from the sads, (and she’s a Canadian, too, so you know mine would never be as earnest as hers anyway). 

I can try on a new pair of perspectacles, though. In fact, I’ve been practicing since earlier this year when my old man got a bunch of baseball tickets. My stepmom Julie’s Christmas gift to Pops was a trip to see the Cleveland Indians play at spring training in Arizona. “This is strategic, see,” explained the old man, who specializes in being pedantic about life decisions, “My old mentor Jack once told me you should plan your trip in February because that’s what going to you through January.” The simple plan struck me as oddly profound. It’s not that dangling a carrot just a short distance from one’s nose is a brand new concept. But I am dazzled by the notion of manufacturing a personal holiday just far enough in the future to get us through. That is, not relying on a civil rights hero to have a birthday observed or for a bestie to decide to come for a visit, in order to incentivize our survival of the Jans/Febs. 

When we’re young, we have to rely on forces outside of our control to spark our great expectations. We circle the date around the calendar as to when the junior high dance is scheduled, and we count down the sleeps until we get to leave for Girl Scout camp. Then we become grown-ups and I can only speak for myself in that sometimes it’s as though I forget that I have agency in how I plan my life. Sometimes I get so psyched about remembering to bring my reusable bags when I grocery shop (I AM THE GREATEST! ECO! HUMAN! EVER!!) that I forget that this is not the point of being an adult. Do better for yourself, Kendra. Do better for nine year-old Kendra who wrote in her diary “It’s Friday and I have to wait a whole two days for school again, what a bummerrrrrrr.” Do it for that girl who didn’t know what fun tasted like. Put the little totem of fun a few miles down your path. Then run your guts out in the race to get there, through the Jans/Febs, through tax returns, through snowbanks and through the pennant flagged car lots trying to sell Cadillac convertibles. Run your guts through all the bologna until you reach that marker. Then, do what Mark and Julie Stanton do at Spring Training.

For context: Mark and Julie are the most Midwestern people you will EVER meet. They make friends EVERYWHERE. Once, while on vacation in Savannah with them, Husband and I got up from the table for a few minutes at a restaurant and a couple of strangers sat down in our place, probably because they smelled the Midwestern on Mark and Julie Stanton. They could sense this was a friendly kind of couple. They had told Pops and Julie their whole life story by the time we got back to the table, leaving nothing out. Net net, Pops and Jules are at spring training. Naturally, they are SO PUMPED because of something they refer to as "Vendor Heaven," which, let me translate that Midwesternese for you: they are irrationally excited over strangers who carry over-the-shoulder satchels full of overpriced snacks to sell you while you watch sports. Pops and Julie text me that they are keeping their eyes peeled for one vendor especial. 

One of my gal pals had been to spring training in the past and bore witness to this supposed snack elysium. She also told us about a particular beer vendor who was so memorable that my folks would likely know him when they saw him. She relayed that the vendor was “stout” and “intense.”

Well, given no other physical description, Pop and Julie texted that they had found The Beer Guy.

The next day, I receive a short video clip from Julie of a poor man’s John Wayne explaining his career trajectory as a beer vendor to his new confessor, Mark Stanton.

Me: “He’s exactly how I imagined him. Did you buy a cold one?”

Julie: “We bought a cold two. He explained to us that he’s battling exhaustion and peaked too early yesterday. Also gave us his itinerary for the next week. Gotta be in top form for the Giants.”

I share the video with my girlfriend who had been at spring training the year prior. She responds, Mmm, he’s not her beer guy. But that she now wants to hang out with my parents at an Indians game and compare notes about favorite vendors of the suds in a ballpark in Arizona.

This is how you sidestep JanuWeariness, it turns out. You buy yourself some tickets to a baseball game that will take place in February and look forward to meeting your beer guy. It doesn’t matter if he’s not someone else’s beer guy. It doesn’t matter if you don’t drink beer. Just embrace him or her, embrace the experience, and boom! Lookathat. It’s already March. Home run.

You have been unsubscribed from the American Dream.

You have been unsubscribed from the American Dream.

We’re sorry to see you go! Would you mind telling us the reason you unsubscribed?

• The content was no longer relevant to me.

• I’m just taking a break until 2020.

• I didn’t realize it was set to auto-renew before 2020.

• I didn’t know I had subscribed by being born on U.S. soil.

• I just finished Between the World and Me.

• I am not a mediocre white man who has romanticized his forefathers’ immigration story.

• It looked like Spam, both the virtual and the canned form.

• It was too expensive, e.g. for my soul.

• I thought this was for Blue Apron.

• I was only able to take advantage of $0.79 of the benefits because I have a uterus.

• The flat pebblesnail has more constitutional protections in the state of Alabama than I do.

• It is easier to purchase an assault rifle in North Dakota than it is to order contact lenses.

• The Dream was not translated into my primary language.

• It was not included with Amazon Prime.

• It wasn’t as user-friendly as I had hoped.

• I’ve moved to Canada like I promised I would.

• My children are separated from me, probably in a cage without medical care.

• Other

The college job I regret you can no longer have

When I arrived home from my first year of college, my mom ceremoniously opened the garage to reveal a brand new silver sedan within. My dad had recently insinuated he might be able to secure me a job with the county auditor, one I’d be required to drive to different neighborhoods every day. This kind of parental headhunting was unusual, given the prior two years of high school when I had worked two jobs, riding my red mountain bike to and from Dairy Queen and being dropped off at my real estate office job on weekends.

The car offered incredible freedom. In the mornings, I ferried my sibs to their camps and other activities. This was also how I came to take the afternoon shift for the traffic survey corps that summer.  Nowhere else that I knew could a college student make $7/hour in my city in 1999. A full tank of gas would cost me around $30. After barely managing a C in college math, this was calculus I could understand.

At traffic survey orientation, a couple dozen high school and college students sat wearing cargo shorts, popping gum and looking disaffected in a sterile conference room. The supervisors laid out the expectations, told us the high penalty for abandoning our stations. They were not afraid to fire employees, they said. They had done it before, even in the middle of the season.

We were now a part of the county’s Traffic Survey Corps. Our job for the next three months was to essentially count how many cars passed through different intersections at appointed hours. The data was to be collected, presumably, to ensure stoplights were appropriately timed depending on traffic flow. We were to represent the department accordingly, mainly by showing up and doing the work.

After our orientation, my seasoned surveyor friends identified the supervisors to fear. “That guy over there?” my friend Colleen explained, “He will sneak up on you. He’ll park down the street and watch you from behind just to make sure you’re working.”

***
My friends took the morning shift so that they would be done by 1p and have the rest of the day to themselves. Plus, If you wore sunglasses, the supervisors couldn’t tell if you were sleeping, they confided.

Right away, I could tell the afternoon shifters were a much different lot than the morning crew. We would arrive at different traffic intersections around the county every day, to relieve the morning shift. The morning shift had coolers, sturdy lawn chairs and plenty of sunscreen. I had just completed my first year of college and it was clear to me that the morning shift were probably the same kids who didn’t mind 8 a.m. classes. They were probably the treasurers and secretaries of their sororities.

Whereas the afternoon shift were an ashtray full of cigarette butts, all still ashing from the night before.

My first shift was in a neighborhood I’d never been to. I used a county-provided paper map to find my intersection, because I was lazy and didn’t want to Mapquest directions and print them out the night before, as was the custom of navigation in 1999.

I parked in a tiny parking lot next to a bar with rotting shingles on the side, right next to where the morning shift were tossing the metal signs identifying their station “TRAFFIC SURVEY” into their trunks. They sped off just as the rains came.

“Are you here for the traffic survey?” asked a guy in a white sedan who had just rolled down his window.
“Yeah! What are we supposed to do?”
“I don’t know. Want to park next to me and we can just work in our cars for now?”

Our supervisor met us a few minutes later and advised we sit in the same car while the rain ensued. My new co-worker and I sat in my car, our mechanical tally boards resting on our laps, as we peered out the rain-soaked windshield and tried to count the cars passing through.

As sheets of rain pounded and the mechanical clicks of our boards filled the first hour, I couldn’t believe this was going to be my job for the next 10 weeks. Just counting and looking. Rinse and repeat.  

Of course, no one yet had a cellphone. There was no distraction from what was before us, no social media apps to inspire FOMO of our friends’ enviable country club jobs. There was only this: six hours of conversation, minus a 30 minute break. Perhaps a car radio if you were really lucky.  

My partner for that first day of surveying in the rain was a quirky boy, the kind who likely owned whole shelves of comic books, and he told me about a show on HBO called “The Sopranos.” I’d never heard of it before.

This would be a personal refrain for me in the traffic survey summer song Oh. I’ve never heard of that before. But now I had, thanks to the afternoon shifters.

Because where the afternoon shifters were not particularly dedicated to providing accurate counts for any intersection at any time on any day, they were fiercely devoted to making sure there was as much mischief occurring during the afternoon shift as possible.

We changed partners every day. I preferred working with the quirky guy--he always kept the conversation tame. In contrast, supervisors and other co-workers alike spoke at length and regularly about sexual romps. I didn’t know a hostile work environment was one in which one was constantly subjected to unwanted stories of sexcapades. I just thought I needed to buck up and ignore it. Sometimes I brought headphones and listened to a book on CD.

I also learned countless card games I no longer remember how to play, but still recall fondly how we could conceal a full deck of cards while masquerading as someone looking up at the intersection and pressing the car tally rhythmically.

One day, on the very grounds of a church in my own neighborhood I had grown up passing almost daily, one of my partners rolled a joint and smoked it for a solid hour. I had taken this particular partner to my high school prom just a year before. Now we were co-workers and he was smoking an illegal substance on company time. On church grounds.

By August, nothing surprised me.

Geographically, I learned that neighborhoods changed one street at a time. I learned that in some of the poshest neighborhoods, people felt comfortable asking what a traffic survey was and whether or not we had any questions they could answer. It seemed everyone had seen the traffic survey corps. No one seemed to know what we did, what our method was, who we were. For the most part, on most of those accounts, neither did we.

By the end of summer, we were all sunburned irrevocably on the fronts of our bodies. The backs of our legs belied the oddly pale people we had been in June. Ones who hadn’t yet spent hours baking--for some of us in more ways than one.

I never went back to the traffic survey; one summer was enough for me. I’m glad I got in while the getting was good, though, since the traffic survey corps. no longer exists. A better way of calculating traffic patterns had already been developed that didn’t depend so entirely on erroneous college student reporting, but our county held on to that vestigial system for as long as it could. Unfortunately for the county, I don’t think the data collected in 1999 was very accurate. Fortunately for us, though, it paid really well.

In fact, I believe I am still earning dividends on the experience that taught me how to abide boredom. The ability to endure--monotony, hot temperatures, the close company of unsavory characters with bad taste in country music-- is something I lament my own children may never experience to this degree. The ability to just be in one place, without a digital feed of reminders of what is happening elsewhere, is a luxury I took for granted. While cars passed me all day, motoring toward destinations unknown, I was sitting still and counting--counting the vehicles and the hours and the paychecks that would advance me toward the end of summer when my supposedly real life would begin. But the realest life I can imagine is one that has to consult a map regularly, to find the good in people whose company you don’t get to choose, to cultivate an awareness of what is happening around you.

Except for the part about your dad leasing the car for you. That is not real life. At least it hasn’t been mine for twenty years.