Ann-Margret in Tommy (1975). Screenshot by Molly Young.
A list of all my enemies, in alphabetical order.
ADMIN
All the tasks I dread because I’m too weak or lazy to (a) find a way to not do them or (b) use my imagination to render them interesting.
BELATEDLY LEARNING A FOREIGN LANGUAGE
Studying a new language when you’re thirty-seven is an unbelievably inefficient use of time. It takes me weeks to grasp what a five-year-old child could pick up without even trying. This isn’t true of anything else I do in my spare time, like gardening or baking. I could crush a five-year-old’s learning curve in both of those things.
When trying to speak a foreign language I am always catapulting myself out of a frying pan and into a fire. Last year, in Mexico, for instance, someone asked why I wasn’t speaking Spanish and I replied, “Because I’m afraid I will accidentally be rude”—except what I actually said was “Because I’m afraid I will accidentally become horny.”
COFFEE HEART
Some call it tachycardia. The New York Times named it “coffee heart” in a 1905 article with the fantastic title of “SMALL BOY HAS ‘COFFEE HEART’ ” and the subtitle “Child of Eight Is in City Hospital Slowly Regaining Health. HEART BEATS TOO FAST. Muscle Was Wearing itself Out — Drank a Dozen Cups a Day.”
The article is about an eight-year-old named Johnnie Murphy, whose heart was apparently beating at “twice the normal rate” after its owner got into the habit of drinking nine to twelve cups per day. A suspiciously timed mention of the coffee substitute Postum at the end of the article raises the likelihood that the whole thing is sponcon, though there’s no way to be sure.
CONSPIRACIES TO ROB US OF OUR DIGNITY
They’re everywhere. Too numerous to list. And growing by the day.
DEPRESSION
In one of his letters Henry James refers to depression as “the azure demon.” An interesting color assignment, azure.
EUROPEAN CLOTHES DRYERS
Not all of them, obviously—just the two most recent ones I happened to meet. Both machines were programmed to be eco-friendly, which meant they automatically sensed when clothes were dry (meaning extremely damp) and stopped tumbling. If I restarted the dry cycle, I could fool them for one to four minutes before they were onto my tricks and shut themselves off again.
FDA FOOD DEFECT LEVELS HANDBOOK
In theory I worship this government website, as I admire anything that is humble in presentation yet vastly utile. But in practice it has undermined my lust for such delicacies as pitted dates and potato chips. And what is an enemy but something or someone who steals your lust for living?
What the site does, helpfully, is share the FDA’s guidelines for how much of a given contaminant (mold, rodent hair, parasites) can be included in a given food item (pineapple juice, macaroni and noodle products, canned tomatoes) before it exceeds the threshold of acceptability. Meaning that, thanks to the FDA, you can gobble your Skippy safe (“safe”) in the knowledge that it contains fewer than thirty insect fragments per hundred grams. Don’t look at the entry for Maraschino cherries.
HARSH VERBIAGE
All sorts of pain can be contained in the name of a unit. For example, to be alone is not a bad thing, but to be a “party of one” is awful.
JELLYFISH LARVAE
To be clear, mature jellyfish are not an enemy. Whether it is an ethereal comb jelly basking in the shallows or a hubcap-size lion’s mane bobbing through hurricane waves, the phylum Cnidaria is one batch of organisms that puts man-made attempts at compositional beauty to shame. That said, the larva of a certain jelly—I haven’t pinpointed the species other than “some bastard who populates a specific point break on the western coast of Mexico”—has a practice that elevates it to the status of enemy.
The swarming larvae are invisible and harmless if they happen to brush up against a human arm or leg. However. If they work their way into, say, a bikini top or pair of trunks, they will rebel at the presence of friction and lash out in a manner that feels like a million microscopic volcanoes erupting. When you paddle tearfully back to shore and rip off your swimsuit you will find that the larvae have left a perfect blistering outline of where your swimsuit once was. Now that I type this, it occurs to me that I’m describing an act of comic heroism, not villainy. When it comes to jellyfish larvae, the enemy might be Me.
LOOKING THINGS UP ONLINE
Also known as “having a bad memory.” The real problem with googling every tiny query that arises is that it has caused the cost of an answer to plummet. All you have to do to is type, e.g., “Is a porpoise a dolphin?” or “What does ethodological mean?” into your phone and wait one instant for the information to arrive. And then, having paid so little, you proceed to forget whatever you learned almost in real time.
NAUSEA
The lowest form of mindfulness.
OTITIS EXTERNA
A stunning name for a crude antagonist.
PODCASTS
In truth I love podcasts. I love having voices piped into my ears, love soothing my nerves with gentle chatter. The only problem is that if I’m not alone with my thoughts … I tend not to have them.
PROCTALGIA FUGAX
Proctalgia fugax sounds like the name of a Thomas Pynchon character or a parasitic fungus but it is neither. It’s a truncheoning pain that occurs in the lowermost back area during periods of stress, anxiety, or pregnancy. Proctalgia fugax brought itself to my attention during a recent pregnancy. I wish nothing would ever “bring itself to my attention.” Only bad things do.
QUEST DIAGNOSTICS
In most cultures it is considered polite to make eye contact with someone before you exsanguinate them.
[REDACTED]
This entry is censored because it is the name of a person. For all of last year I wished him harm. More recently I’ve been wishing I could stop wishing him harm … which is wonderful progress.
SPREE (WORD)
Used almost exclusively in the contexts of crime and shopping—but why?
T-SHIRTS THAT SAY WHERE THE WEARER ATTENDED COLLEGE
An objectively uncool category of clothing.
UNISOM
The only over-the-counter sleeping aid that renders me unconscious, but at a steep cost: it thwarts dreaming. Sleep without dreams is hardly worth it. I do enjoy thinking of the name Unisom as a portmanteau of Unified and Somnolence, as though the tablets might work by consolidating all of one’s disparate torpors into a dense nocturnal block.
WRITER (IDENTITY)
If I’m honest, I don’t know why my brain puts certain words in a certain order. One day I will get worse at doing so, and I will continue to get worse until eventually I stop, and that will have been my career.
Molly Young is a book critic for the New York Times.
