I started with “Dynamite,” then hopped around some. On a whim one of those days, I decided to spend my day online listening to BTS videos on YouTube. It turned out that this tendency did not go away when I was left to my own devices in a small apartment with nowhere to go. I spent a lot of time wrestling with self-doubt, which I do all the time in the best circumstances. We were getting ready to launch Defector Media, which meant reuniting with everyone I used to work with to ask people to give us money to write about sports and culture in the middle of a massive global crisis. Without that regimentation, I wouldn’t have done anything at all. My days played out through deeply regimented blocks of time that had been assigned to various tasks for various spaces in the small apartment I shared with a husband and two cats, which later became one cat when one died during the pandemic. I was spending very little time at the beach, or outside, or seeing people at all when I discovered the Korean band BTS during the COVID-19 pandemic. That’s what unbridled joy made you look like, I thought-maybe a goofy tourist, or maybe just a sucker. I also never bought the ice cream because I knew it was cheaper off the beach overpriced beach ice cream, in my mind, was for tourists and suckers. I didn’t want to have to wash the saltwater from my hair later. Hell, most of the time, even when I did go to the beach, I did not even go in the water. That is so lame.Īll that unbridled emotion somehow curdled in my mind. A friend once told me about the time she saw people running and screaming into the ocean with happiness and, though I don’t recall the exact words of my response, I remember the emotion of it: Oh, come on. As a child of Florida-my parents moved to the state when I was a year old, I grew up there, I went to college there, I worked in various newspapers across the state for eight and a half years, I traveled it from Pensacola to Jacksonville to Key West, I met my future husband there-I didn’t think much of or about moments like these. To see them flopping wholly into the warm salt water and tiny waves is to witness an unbridled and almost unhinged glee. They try their best on the dry sand, then become more surefooted on the compacted wet sand, navigate past the clumps of seaweed and beach detritus, and then throw their bodies into the ocean. People arriving from landlocked parts of the country, who perhaps have not even seen the ocean before, tend to run toward it people who have seen the ocean before, but not for awhile, run too. This is a common enough sight in Florida, a large landmass of limestone risen up from the ocean floor that juts out between the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico as a giant stretch of coastline, and also where I grew up. I used to watch people run into the ocean.
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