Pickleball Problems
& Peachy Pleasures
JULY
Though you struggle to find joy in everyday life during the summer, you do manage to put a little spring in your step for the in-season fruit. What sadness can’t be sweetened by white peaches tossed in a light cashew cream? But just as the summer is ripe with delicious produce, so too is it fertile with amnesia for you personally, Virgo. Your seasonal self knowledge is here today gone tomorrow, leaving you too clueless to ever wonder if it was ever there at all.
You are not the first person to hate the summer, nor will you be the last, but you seem to lack the neural pathways to incorporate this lifelong feeling to memory. Georgia O’Keeffe once said, “I have done nothing all summer but wait for myself to be myself again.” Instead of taking comfort in your similarities, you speed read through this quote without seeing yourself reflected in the text whatsoever.
However, in a gross act of flamboyantly making my own point for me, you do see yourself reflected in another detail of her life. You once read that Georgia O’Keeffe’s daily routine included building a fire each morning at her home in the desert. You’ve carried this detail with you ever since, clutching onto its memory like a talisman protecting you from the reality of your life—a life entirely devoid of fire making, being a renowned painter, and natural vistas. And yet when you’re met with a quote with most potential to reflect the aching needs of your soul back at you, you simply plow on without a moment lost to introspection.
You are not a stranger to choosing the wrong balm for your wounds, Virgo. This month, you attempt to convince yourself that you love the summer by briefly participating in a trendy outdoor passtime: pickleball. During childhood your family took to the sport, so during your annual summertime visit back to the Pacific Northwest you bully your loved ones into joining you on the local courts for some P ball.
Despite a personal history wholly lacking in lauded athleticism, you enter the court with a vigorous confidence absent in most other arenas of your life. You shit talk like you’re in the climax of a dance battle movie from the early 2000s—only you’re not having to balance the expectations of two diametrically opposed communities, and the recipients of your poison are all closely related to you. Additionally confounding, you all decide to play a collaborative game in which you try and get as many volleys back and forth as possible, making the presence (and vibrancy) of your shit-talking all the more dumbfounding.
Enjoying a few moments of pickleball is all the data you’ll need to decide this is your new path, your eventual legacy, your life’s work. You’ll get to work determining where you can play pickleball back home in Brooklyn. Of course there’s indoor vs. outdoor courts to consider, since you won’t want the weather to get in between you and your new passion.
Improbably, your husband also enjoyed the venomous game, so you spend a few delicious hours imagining your life as people who wear cute pickleball outfits and exercise together. Maybe even join a league! In total, unflinching sincerity, you agree that a backyard is the most important feature in your next apartment.
Sure, you have another 14 months on your lease, but there’s no time like the present to begin a soul crushingly depressing search for garden apartments. The New York housing market isn’t famous for its stability, reliability, or friendliness to people looking to expand their space to meet their evolving needs—but maybe that changes today!
To your great surprise, none of the listings feature enough backyard space to fit a regulation pickleball court (20 feet by 40 feet), but that won’t slow you down. You can sacrifice in other aspects of real estate. Who needs a standard kitchen if it means you can make space for one on the court? The heart of the matter is simple: despite all available data, you’ve become people who simply crave the outdoors.
You’ll become so fixated on this ideal that you wonder how you justified a combined two decades in Brooklyn without a backyard. You eschew straightforward explanations; it couldn’t be budgetary, or your aversion to bugs, or your impossible to shake belief that ground floor apartments always have wild perverts approaching the windows, patiently waiting for the precise moment a ceiling fan blows your elaborate curtained fortress slightly askew—thus delivering the pervert precisely what they crave: a brief glimpse of you in a loose ratty tank top.
A home court won’t be the only self-made bump in your road, Virgo. You’ll begin to wonder if your husband boasts the same commitment (talent, even!) as you to this beautiful, perfect game (that, just a reminder, you won’t have truly played since—again—you were just volleying a ball back and forth to unimpressive results). You’ll wonder if incongruencies in your devotion and skill set will be a wedge between you. Can you trust that he’ll see the necessity of traveling for nationals?
Once you return to Brooklyn and its barbarous humidity, you’ll be reminded that you are not outdoors people whatsoever. You simply took a nice trip and enjoyed a local amenity. The negative space between your desired self could swallow twenty-eight regulation pickleball courts (the exact number of pickleball courts at Pickleball America in Stamford, Connecticut).
I see that part of the appeal of pickleball in your eyes is its potential to make you feel like a normal person with normal interests instead of the sad, observational, clown you are au naturale. You want to be a carefree person! That seems really fun to you! So much so that when you go to try a neighborhood taco spot for the first time you leave in tears because everyone inside seemed “young and at ease.”
There are times when I see you “trying” to enjoy the summer in a way that feels, to me, like you think you’re being optimistic. Is ignoring your true nature an act of optimism? Just as looking at a wound and saying No it’s fine, is not an act of optimism, so too is ignoring your nature. We cannot frame recognizing reality as a pessimistic act, Virgo.
I beg you to see that bending to enjoy this season can be softer, less contorted. You don’t have to reinvent yourself and your interests from top to bottom—spouse to apartment—to fit the bill. Just as you don’t need to build a fire everyday to enjoy that potentially misremembered detail about Georgia O’Keeffe.
It’s okay to allow summer to be what it always is for you. Melancholic, with fruit.
Thank you to my dear google formers for joining me last month! It’s a relief to know this project is read by so many people poised to ruin an Easter celebration at a moment’s notice. If you’d like to say hi highly specifically, the google form for this month is here. If you’d like to quietly observe, my instagram is here. If you’d like to see my husband play at Joe’s Pub on August 23rd, the link is here. Thank you for reading! <3
"Can you trust that he’ll see the necessity of traveling for nationals?" lolol
You're so cool. Let's play pickleball (or not)