The pandemic has evaporated entire categories of friendship, and by doing so, depleted the joys that make up a human life-and buoy human health. These other relationships have withered largely unremarked on after the places that hosted them closed. Understandably, much of the energy directed toward the problems of pandemic social life has been spent on keeping people tied to their families and closest friends. Tools like Zoom and FaceTime, useful for maintaining closer relationships, couldn’t re-create the ease of social serendipity, or bring back the activities that bound us together. The depth and intensity of these relationships varied greatly, but these people were all, in some capacity, my friends, and there was also no substitute for them during the pandemic. Workers at the local coffee or sandwich shops who could no longer dawdle to chat. Co-workers I didn’t know well but chatted with in the communal kitchen. Pretty good friends with whom I had mostly done things that were no longer possible, such as trying new restaurants together. In the weeks following, I thought frequently of other people I had missed without fully realizing it. But many comforted me through mutual, bone-deep disappointment, or sprayed champagne at me in exhilaration. Of the dozens of fellow fans and bar employees I’d greet with a hug on a normal fall Saturday, I follow only a handful of them on social media for most of the others, I know only their first name, if that. In noticing all the ways the show misunderstood its joys, I realized how much I missed it, and especially how much I missed all of those people I only sort of know. But the other experience-the one Emily in Paris was trying to portray-has been lost entirely. I know this because I am, sometimes unfortunately, a person who has spent a good chunk of her adult social life watching sports in bars, both with my actual close friends and with 500 or so fellow travelers at the New York City bar that hosts expatriated University of Georgia alumni during college-football season.ĭuring the pandemic, I’ve been able to maintain, on an outdoor TV, the ability to watch a game with a couple of my closest buddies, which is a balm. It doesn’t come close to capturing the sweaty intensity of a horde of nervous fans, poised to embrace each other in collective joy or drink through despair. The scene is fleeting, and it’s also pretty bad. Specifically, watching sports in a packed bar, which is what the titular character’s boyfriend is doing when the viewer meets him. Not for travel, or for opportunities to wear beautiful clothes-two commonly cited high points in an otherwise charmless show-but for sports.
PANDEMIC HORDE MUMBLE SERIES
A few months ago, when millions of Americans were watching the Netflix series Emily in Paris because it was what we had been given that week, I cued up the first episode and was beset almost immediately by an intense longing.
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