What if...I did not do a thing
An un-announcement!
For best results, I recommend playing “Graduation” by Vitamin C in the background while reading.
On Wednesday night, season three of The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City premieres. On Thursday morning (presumably), Vulture will post a recap. It will not be written by me!
Before I get into why (spoiler — they asked me, I said I wouldn’t be able to! What you’re about to read is not gossip about my pals at Vulture, but instead a reflection on finitude, experimentation, and making “bad” decisions that will hopefully be “good” in hindsight), first, let’s talk about how.
For me, writing a recap takes 1-2 hours of watching and note-taking, then 2-4 hours of writing and researching (shoutout to everyone on this television program who’s engaged in nefarious hobbies I’ve had to become vaguely literate in!), and about 14 hours of agonizing before, after, and everywhere in between. The agonizing is a dull undercurrent that people who write books about writing/art/etc. call “the creative process.”
I’m making this sound bad — it’s not! It’s sort of like how cats do obnoxious shit like turn your new couch into a shredded piece of modern art and scream for an hour before every meal even though they know how to tell time, but you put up with it because it feels incredible to have a small creature occasionally show how much they love you. So it’s less that the end result is worth the agony, but that the agony is a foregone conclusion. Being alive is agony. Not making anything is agony. So agony may as well be in pursuit of something.
Recapping gave me something for quite some time. The idea of a “season” is a misnomer for any Bravo program because 24 episodes is an absolute minimum of 5.52 months, which is at least two calendar seasons. And that’s not counting the bye weeks that are inevitably skipped so Bravo fans can devote all holiday season energy to stoke their own familial drama flames.
Writing a colossal dumpster heap of words about the same topic every single week for a lot of weeks in a row taught me that I am capable of making stuff not just without inspiration, but when I am actively uninspired to the point that I’d rather clean Whitney Rose’s stripper pole with my tongue than start a new Google doc.
When I was compiling data for the above chart, my gut reaction upon seeing Gatsby’s word count was, “ooh maybe you can sub for the new recapper to close that gap real quick. Two more after that and you’d be longer than The Hours by Michael Cunningham, which feels appropriate…” And that, my friends, is why I am cutting myself off! More is not always more.
I’m going to get earnest here for a second. Even though I have spent years untangling my sense of self-worth from my productivity and/or perceived societal “success,” recognition is a helluva drug (and probably a basic human need). Sure, it feels bad to have the occasional Vulture commenter write a micro-essay on how unfunny you are (it’s harder than it looks, bud — especially when it’s episode 17 and you’re filing copy from the floor of the O’Hare United Terminal while simultaneously doing your “real” job that pays the rent). But you know what feels fucking great? Having strangers reach out just to tell you that they think you’re a hilarious genius. If nothing else, I now understand just a tiny bit more how celebrities' brains slowly become broken.
It’s also hard to say no to things that are “impressive” on a wider scale. Can most people in my life name a member of the Shah Squad, past or present? Absolutely not. Have they heard of New York Magazine, even if they confuse it with The New Yorker? Undoubtedly.
Sprinting away from easily comprehensible wins in favor of unknown strangeness requires more strength and support than I could have imagined. I’ve become intimately aware that my creative project energy is not “yes, and” but rather a whole lot of “OR.”
Saying yes to another season of recaps meant saying no to real and imagined other projects, but it also meant saying no to things I’ve come to value more in the “off-season.” Seeing my friends in real life with unrushed regularity, watching stupid movies on Sunday afternoons, hiking multiple days a week, not using a Twitter account. I can’t un-know how essential those things feel now.
Because no matter how much my silly little brain wants to pretend otherwise, its energy is finite. The plus side of that limit is that cute new freak-mode projects* get to expand to fill the hole left by my research on Lisa Barlow’s political contributions! Or something. TBD, but that’s the most exciting part.
*Announcement(s) to come soon (maybe)! (I started subconsciously — and then actually — planting seeds for alternative uses for recap time/energy months ago, but I believe in jinxing things more than I’d care to admit.)
This newsletter brought to you by:
Watching a new episode of The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City last week like a normal fan instead of a transcriptionist for the first time ever. Absolute bliss
(P.S. If you work for NBCUniversal, please keep the screeners coming! Just because I’m not recapping doesn’t mean my dumb ass will be able to resist writing “Catharsis, Bitches! An Aristotelian Analysis of The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” or “Every Shoe Jen Shah Wore This Season, Scientifically Ranked by Potential Jury Sympathy” or some other nonsense.)
Trader Joe’s Spooky Bats & Cats Sour Gummy Candy, except not the orange ones because they taste like Delsym cough syrup
A rotisserie chicken
All the pals who support me and my silly little projects <3
I laugh-snorted. Love you, Olivia
-Cherie