Ads—with Thoughts & Feelings
January brings out the charcoal juice in a gym (which is not a gym).
As a sophomore in college, I lived in the basement of a residential dorm that called itself “one of the most beautiful houses on campus;” it was for students who were “interested in the language and culture of the French-speaking world.” In translation: the ‘heads’ of the house were responsible for cheese acquisition.
Their other responsibility was to assure the new people that we would not get one of the beautiful rooms—hardwood floors, built-in bookshelves, wide windows—in the beautiful house. In the housing lottery, rooms were determined by seniority; I had one of the lowest numbers. Thus: the basement.
To be fair, it was technically the ground level, with windows that were partially above ground. But in my room, I fell asleep to a panorama of ground and dirt, and when you can see ants crawling through said dirt, the technicalities of infrastructure designations are not exactly top of mind.
I chose to live in the house ostensibly to “expand my French language skills,” as I told the two people who interviewed me. (Skill was generous: in one oral exam that year, I told my professor “I’m done,” only for her to tell me that instead, I’d told her, “I’m dead.”) I didn’t mention that incident. Instead I talked about baguettes and cardio kickboxing.
The main appeal of the house was that it let me live off-campus: I could get off the university meal plan and cook again. The house had two large kitchens, one of which was in the basement. Its walls looked like stained mustard, and the couple that lived in the room next to mine once started a fire in the microwave at 3AM. It was a kitchen, though, and that was what I wanted.
If you've ever lived in New England, you’re familiar with the fact that winter begins around Halloween and ends somewhere in April.
During my four years in Rhode Island, I bought two winter coats in Starburst shades of yellow and pink. That was strategic: I thought that if I fell into a snowbank, at least I would be visible. Also, yellow and pink are the best Starburst flavors.
In the year that I lived in one of the beautiful house’s ugly rooms, we had a January storm that stunned us with a foot of snow. Surrounded by the concrete walls of my room, I watched as the snow, in the span of just a few hours, blocked about ¾ of the two windows. For what I remember as a week and a half, the only natural light that reached me was a rectangle of shy light.
The starkness of that snow rose again last week, when I turned a page of the Sunday New York Times and encountered an ad with a point to make.
“WE DON’T SPEAK JANUARY,” it shouted from the bathroom floor, where it had welcomed in 2023 by telling anybody who entered that they needed to detox with charcoal juice, and maybe to consider voting for Kevin McCarthy.
“I didn’t ask if you did,” I pointed out.
“IT’S NOT FITNESS,” it added, wrapping a face towel around its fists like it was Muhammad Ali. “IT’S LIFE.”
“Okay, bud,” I said, removing the charcoal juicebox from its mouth. “Let’s have a carb now, yeah?”
So the ad of course is for a gym, Equinox, although Equinox would never stoop to calling itself a gym; that’s for the losers of this world, your Planet Fitnesses and Washington Sports Clubs that can’t get their act together.
No, Equinox is a “luxury fitness club”—nay, a “temple of well-being,” according to the SEO search results. It’s where members pay to join clubs with amenities like eucalyptus steam rooms. (I would like to be a member of that club.)
On January 1, however, no new members were allowed entry to the temple of well-being, as Equinox has a principled stance, courtesy of its marketing department, against people who sign up on January 1. Equinox suspects they are the kind of people who unironically post #NewYearNewYou from their own poorly-lit bathroom, rather than a yacht off the coast of Monaco. (Bad bathroom lighting is bad for the brand.)
The ad also moonlights as a slam poet:
I don’t think I’ve seen an ad that actively hostile towards a month, ever. Yes, January isn’t the best month—I’m writing this while staring out at skeleton trees—but it’s doing its best. December is a tough act to follow: it’s a time when everybody wants to be happy; they’re dressing up, they’re yelling at their family, it’s great.
January, meanwhile, reminds you that you’re still you, and life doesn’t care about that. You wake up and you wake up and again, still, it’s just you, steaming in the awful lighting of your bathroom and wondering if this is waking up, could you just go back to sleep?
A friend asked me what I was scared of, with the new year, and I told him I was scared that nothing would change. Much to my surprise, it turns out I do speak January.
In “Find Your Beach,” Zadie Smith writes about an ad that came to consume her: a beer that invited passersby to “find your beach.” (It is a great phrase.) The ad was a parable of her city, its ferocious peddling of the illusion that New York City is the place to be if you want to be free. Reflecting on the piece nine years later, I can see it as an unknowing parable of 2014 (possibly), two years away from the 2016 election and its shattered indignities. “Find your beach,” the drink called, and people drank. It was that easy: somebody asked and somebody answered. (Like any parable, this one goes down a little too easily.)
Smith wonders at the grammar of the ad—the confidence, yes, but also the gesture of boundless authority. “The construction is odd,” she writes. “A fairly threatening mix of imperative and possessive forms, the transformation of a noun into a state of mind.”
She considers, “Perhaps I’m reaching too much into it.” Then continues to read too much into it, or so some might say.
I suspect Zadie Smith does not throw down her towel with abandon at beaches. She assesses.
FIND YOUR BEACH. WE DON’T SPEAK JANUARY: I envy the untapped ease of these ads. They do not overthink; they do not have illusions about the nature, speed, or even indeed viability of healing; they do not sing “Imagine” during the onset of a pandemic and in the process insult a dead man named John Lennon. They have what they need. Now they want us to know it.
The Equinox ad despises January. “It thinks time is on its side,” sneers your neighborhood temple of wellbeing. But does January actually think time cares? That’s a reach.
I don’t know anybody right now who believes time is on their side, let alone in January of all months. In fact, I’ve lost my ability to begin small talk with anything but my inability to remember time. I keep repeating what I’ve been saying since the pandemic started: What month is it? How is today Monday? Why does every day feel like Wednesday? Don’t remind me about my birthday!
On Sunday, a friend sighed and told me, “We’re so old.” We were talking about high school reunions. He graduated in 2008. I was offended that he had lumped me in with his lot, given that I graduated in 2013, and thought he was my age, if not younger, when we met. How dare you! I should have responded. I am youth!
(Incidentally, I do not understand TikTok, I struggled to open a jar of marmalade this morning, and I find listening to BBC Radio 4 very soothing. I also call the youth “youth.”)
It all reminds me of a line from Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, which is on my mind because I’m currently reading its semi-follow up The Candy House:
“Sure, everything is ending,” Jules said, “but not yet.”
What’s your small good thing of the week?
Let Me Tell You About Gidget
The weather here keeps swinging itself around like a slingshot: it can’t make up its mind about whether to blast us with erratic wind or go into early heat. This week, Gidget dealt with the former—and with the overwhelm of life—by constructing this:
A Continual Note of Gratitude
Like everything I write these days, this was written during sessions of The Writers’ Hour, an online hourly Zoom writing session hosted by the London Writer’s Salon. LWS is an online writing community so lovely and supportive that reminds me why I love writing in the first place.
My small good thing is that I have been logging off of social media Monday - Friday to wonderful effects so far. I've managed to avoid a good bit of the January advertising onslaught this way, but I guess as your experience belies, it cannot be avoided in tangible form either!
I graduated high school in 2009, and around 26 or so is when I started feeling like I had aged out of being 'young' - not quite old, but, well. Welcome.