Welcome to Notes from the Economy Class, the newsletter that put this baby on a plane to China at the beginning of this week.
I just took her on her first flight, right? Who told this baby she could visit whole other continents without me?
Your Flight Today
So Summerween is a whole retail thing now. The made-up holiday has its origins in Gravity Falls, via an eponymous episode in which June 22 was designated as the day for people who like Halloween so much that they celebrate it twice a year.
Sneak recommendation: Do a summertime Gravity Falls watch. It’s the perfect show for people whose calendars still include school summer breaks.
Two constituencies are thrilled about the emergence of this holiday — media sites, which can use the new holiday for SEO-optimized articles, and retailers, who can draft off the unequivocal success of Halloween spending.
I've already covered the whys behind the increase in Halloween spending. What I'm more interested in is how Summerween is at least the second made-up holiday to cross the television barrier into the real world, if not the third.
We can say definitively that Galentine's Day (February 13) is traced back to a 2010 episode of Parks and Rec, where girlfriends get together for a celebratory breakfast. "Friendsgiving" is not rooted in the TV show Friends — although that show did have ten signature Thanksgiving episodes celebrating the virtues of found family — but the concept was introduced to the wider mainstream culture via A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving and has been a staple of television episodes for decades.
As a kid who was always starved for age-appropriate peers and non-beige food at family Thanksgivings, this seemed like the dream.
Hack writers say that three items constitute a trend. I'm not going to go that far, but I'd like to point out some heart-warming similarities among the three events. They're secular, so anyone can participate. They're apolitical, so people can't get all worked up over radical ideas like "let's honor the people who died so we can have weekends!" or "let's honor the people who died in service to their country!" They come from television shows, a form of episodic media that closely mirrors social relationships in terms of constancy and emotional engagement. And there is no weird childhood baggage for the people most likely to be responsible for throwing holiday bashes, i,e, the Gen Xers and Millennials whose childhood holiday memories were all formed during the peak-divorce era.
I will not be buying a ghost wearing a candy-corn bikini, a thing that some sick mind actually dreamed up and made real in this fallen world. But I like that amid all the societal changes that have percolated across the decades, the openness to inventing new holidays manages to do two things: tick off the fun police and leave the rest of us to have fun.
Your In-Flight Snack
My good friend Kate Washington's book, Midstream: A Life Remade in 50 Swims, is coming out on July 7, and in anticipation of book launch day, I'd like to offer two aquatic treats.
First, depending on where you live and how much you enjoy swimming outside, you may love Caroline Clements and Dillon Seitchik-Reardon 's Places We Swim California. It's part coffee-table book, part guide to the best swimming holes the state has to offer. Each entry also includes tips on what kind of hiking hazards you might encounter as you clamber or climb toward the promised swim, and there are spots to be found all over the state.
My second recommendation is much more regional, so apologies to all of you outside the San Francisco Bay Area.
During the summer, East Bay Parks District opens swimming access at a number of its parks, and one of them has become a regular after-work hang.
Temescal Regional Recreation Area, a little gem of a park tucked into the crook of Oakland’s Highway 13/Highway 24 intersection, includes Lake Temescal, a pretty little reservoir with a beach. Happily, the lake has currently fought its algae problem to a standstill (though a longer-term solution is needed) and it’s open for swimming.
If you need me, this is where you can find me.
After one passes the swim test at the lifeguard stand, one can swim out past the play area and to the lap section — 80 meters, end to end, per my Apple Watch — to tread or swim in the deep, cool water. And while one can crane one's head to watch cars whizzing by on either the Hwy 24 or Hwy 13, it's more fun to simply swim, or pick out all the different shades of green in the grasses and trees surrounding the lake, or watch swallows skim the water.
In Why We Swim, Bonnie Tsui describes the appeal of swimming somewhere other than a pool:
It's an exercise in thresholds. How much I can take, how much distance I need, how far I can get from shore before I feel afraid, at what point I desire to return to land. I brew and brood over things that seem to be of consequence, but by the end of a swim, the water has washed much of that away.
For anyone local who has found that they're staring too much at their screens, scrolling too much through endless bad news, ticking boxes off endless to-do lists … get to Temescal Lake. See if you can spot the herons as you swim from buoy to buoy. Watch the fog roll into the hills around you. Notice how the water changes colors with the clouds. Emerge from the lake feeling lighter and happier.
Temescal Lake is open to swim from 11 am to 6 pm every day through August 14, then on weekends through September 27. $5 per car.