my favorite pandemic activity, contact tracing, and advice for weirdos
Probably my favorite thing to do on weekends is to drink half a bottle of wine and watch a really weird foreign movie. I’m talking little to no plot, extremely specific subgenre, actors that have only previously appeared in Instagram Live videos, the works. Some recent favorites include And Then We Danced, about gay dancers from Georgia, the country, and Crystal Swan, about, loosely, techno fans in Belarus. I like the subtitles because it means you can’t multitask, which is what I normally do during movies.
However, obscure movies are even better when you can pressure your friends into watching them, too, so that you can later talk about all your favorite parts, which actor was hottest, and what you would have done if faced with Bogdan’s goat-farm situation.
To that end, here are a few free tips for pressuring your friends into watching weird-ass movies that aren’t in English and are not even in wide release, just so you can have someone to talk about them with:
1) Overstate how relevant the movie will be to their life. Any passing comment can become a reason they should devote two hours of their life to your pet interest. Have they expressed a taste for biscuits with honey? A perfect friend to rope into Honeyland, which is a long documentary about honey cultivators in Macedonia.
2) Minimize how difficult it will be to watch the movie. This ain’t Top Gun, these puppies aren’t on Netflix. To watch Crystal Swan, I had to download the app for Amazon Prime onto my Roku, then sign up for a service called Mubi, which after a free trial is a separate monthly fee, and then pay for Crystal Swan separately as a download. You’re gonna want to gloss over all these hurdles, in the manner of the guy listing side effects at the end of a drug commercial.
3) Refuse to talk about anything else until they’ve watched the movie. “Oh yeah, your husband got promoted? That’s great. It’s kind of like when Merab got promoted to the main dancing ensemble. Oh wait, I forgot, you haven’t seen it.” This will grate on their nerves so much they will either watch it or stop being friends with you.
4) Select your movie-pressuring friend wisely. This has to be a friend who has put up with your bullshit for a long time. If they’ve been with you through fad diets, “I’m never drinking again” spells, and long discussions of that Aziz Ansari article, they’re ready to be guilted into indulging your art tastes for no reason.
I did a fun interview with Robert Mather, an associate dean and professor of psychology at the University of Central Oklahoma, at his website. Robert is actually in my book, because he’s one of the few conservative social psychologists in America and I think maybe on earth.
Here’s one of my favorite questions that he asked me, which is supposedly advice for weirdos, but is really advice for all of us right about now:
RM: Is it rewarding to think that your book can help others who feel left out and inspire them to reframe their experiences? What message do you have for those who find themselves “weird”?
OK: I would say the big takeaway is that what you tell yourself matters. As I write in the book, a big strength that the more successful "weirdos" have is that they're able to tell themselves better narratives about whatever is happening to them. Rather than being a victim, they're the underdog who's poised for a win. Rather than an oddball, they're the creative genius. I don't mean to make this sound easy—I'm a pretty negative person, and I find it hard to put a happy face on things. But *trying* to come up with a better story for your life is a really good way to tap into those last reserves of resilience and make it through a difficult time. (Actually, it's okay if you're even lying to yourself a little bit, as long as you're not so delusional as to be hurting yourself or others.) When the poop really hits the fan in my life, I've started telling myself, "at least I can write about this." It's my own version of coming up with a more positive way of seeing things.
For The Atlantic, I wrote about contact tracing and why it’s “a miserable failure” in the U.S. compared to everywhere else, in the words of one of my sources. It comes down to three reasons:
1) There are too many cases, so tracers don’t have time to reach everyone who might be infected
2) Tests are taking too long to come back, so by the time someone gets notified by a contact tracer, they’ve already been walking around infecting people for days
3) This is a big one: Americans seem to fundamentally distrust the government, including its contact tracers. To wit:
Besides Openshaw, many others got up in arms about H.R. 6666, the contact-tracing bill. Some worried that its bill number was too close to the sign of Satan. “United States Citizens, contact your neighbor, your relatives, and your friends, and warn them that contact tracing is a ploy for the worst crime against humanity: democide and population control,” a man named Demetrios Alexandros wrote on Facebook, using a term for the murder of people by the government. Someone started a petition on whitehouse.gov soon after the bill was introduced, saying it was reminiscent of life in “NAZI Germany.”