#32: Carly Rae Jepsen and Joy

23 September 2021

It's been like six months since I last checked in--the promised Hot Vaxx Summer actually turned into, at least for me, Is This What Depression Feels Like? Summer in which a lot of phone games were played and a lot of sweating was done and not a whole lot else. I did form a phone callus, which is an embarrassing but true thing to admit. There was also a lot of good news, which I'll be sharing more about soon, but it turns out that the thing that was going to do it as far as getting me out of my newsletter-writing funk was the 10th anniversary of Carly Rae Jepsen's Pop Masterpiece, "Call Me Maybe," and more specifically, seeing this tweet:

I...love Carly Rae so much. SO MUCH. I have, and still do, walk down the street doing a little dance to perfect song "Cut to the Feeling" on repeat, I own EMOTION on vinyl, the music video to "I Really, Really, Really Like You" is both goofy and a guaranteed dopamine hit. I have read so many incredible articles about why Carly Rae is a modern mystic, or like, children and Carly Rae. Carly Rae has soundtracked moments of Peak Friendship--I was at that now legendary event in Brooklyn where a series of drunk people explicated each track on EMOTION. When Hanif Abdurraqib read his essay, my friends, Anna and Jamie and Penny and Rose, all wrapped their arms around each other and me and turned us into a many-headed, many-limbed, knotted-up creature of love and closeness. The night ended with absolutely goof-off dancing to every single track on the album and a drunk cab ride to Queens at 3 a.m. in a world that now seems unimaginable and unreachable.

All this to say: This tweet feels like my summer and my world and the inside of my mind.

Every joy this summer has felt snatched out of the jaws of doom, has felt sweet and free nonetheless. I was at a twice-postponed, now-happening wedding in August for some friends. There were about 100 of us under the fairy lights in their backyard, and it all felt almost, enchantedly, beautifully, normal. The wedding itself was beautiful, the kind where you are tearing up even as the bride comes around the corner, where you get to see your partner goof around with all his oldest friends. I knew both bride and groom to be CRJ fans, and I spent most of the night dancing in breathless anticipation of breathlessly dancing to Carly Rae. Finally, as the night was winding to a close, when my dress was soaked through with sweat and I had taken a breather with a ginger whiskey in hand, the opening notes to "I Really Like You" rang out, and half the people I was talking to, me included, abandoned their drinks on nearby tables, hiked up their skirts, and sprinted to the dance floor. It was one of those moments where we knew every word (and the magic of CRJ is that you, yes you, already probably know like 80% of those words already), the point in the evening where inhibitions had been annihilated by hours of steady drinking and everyone just fucking went for it. You know the kind of dancing I'm talking about--absolutely goofy, finger-pointing, butt-shaking wildness.

I woke up the next morning with my abs sore like I had worked out for hours, a cut on my knee from stepping on my own dress and falling off the dance floor/stage and, despite the hangover, a sense of fullness, of joy. A few weeks later, I watched the Joffrey Ballet do Justin Peck's "The Times are Racing," which, if you've ever got the chance, do it. The link above is to a brilliant tap duet, but the pas de deux that follows is, and I cannnot say this more clearly, the way your body feels when it's on a first date. It's full of these little sprightly movements, little twists and skips and bodily flirtations and a PERFECT almost-kiss of the sort that made the entire David Koch Theater gasp when I watched it opening night at the New York City Ballet years ago. This is, I'm going to say, the entire point of Carly Rae Jepsen as well--the feeling, most specifically, of being on a first date or having One of Those Crushes.

Jia Tolentino's article, linked above, is actually a fantastic summary of CRJ as modern mystic--that is to say, as someone who is involved and interested in the pure feeling of things, and who is immersed, subsumed, joyously and gloriously overwhelmed by it. No better example than "Cut to the Feeling:"

I wanna cut to the feeling, oh yeah
I wanna cut to the feeling, oh yeah
Take me to emotion, I want to go all the way
Show me devotion and take me all the way

St. Teresa of Avila whom??? Pure emotion, pure devotion, pure desire to be entirely in the feeling of the presence of the beloved. No feelings this year have been this uncomplicated, this joyful or ecstatic, but it turns out that dancing yourself sore to Carly Rae Jepsen at a celebration of love is a great way to return yourself to yourself, to reconnect those neural pathways that are for giddiness and glee.

The summer ended with another wedding. Haley's wedding was maybe the fifth time we had seen each other in person. In planning this email, I actually learned that she was also very nearly at that Brooklyn CRJ party, that she lived a half-mile from me when we both lived in New York. Now neither one of us does, but we do talk every day, she and Missy and I, and this virtual friendship has somehow become one of the most solid, connected, and precious relationships in my life. At the wedding, I got to see Haley and Missy for the first time in ages, and getting to spend time with them, but also just, watching Haley exist in actual, 3-dimensional space as she glided across her parent's backyard in her handmade(!!!) wedding dress felt like such an unbelievable gift. In the aftermath of the wedding, as Haley disappeared off into her newly-wedded bliss, Missy and I got to actually hang out, spending one of those nights that starts out as just bowling and then you go your separate ways but then someone says, well, I could have a drink, and that singular drink turns into drinks and oysters and more drinks and eventually crashing in the spare room of an AirBnB. Again, I left that wedding weekend absolutely brimming with something--joy or simple exaltation at spending time with friends again, or the sadness inherent in the sense that I had lived through something special and not-repeatable.

And in a lot of ways, it wasn't--this summer, as it existed, will never happen again. Thank goodness for that, but also thank goodness for the moments of joy we did happen to carve out of the solid mass of time we were given. Hopefulness, as the tweet says, does not actually feel completely dead, simply unbearably distant most of these days, but if what it takes to make it stronger is to put my Carly Rae records on and do a little dancing, then why am I doing anything else?