A Case for Prioritizing Joy

This week, I threw a party.

For what? For whom? You might ask.

For… a strawberry tart.

That’s right. I threw a party for a strawberry tart. It felt like the only way. And because I have the best friends in the whole world, it became a whole vibe. Let me tell you the story.

In these last few weeks, as Israel and Iran were trading missiles, suddenly, the acronym MOP (Massive Ordnance Penetrator) entered the public lexicon. (I can hear you thinking, “where is she going with this?” stay with me) Not long after, we all were reading articles not about peace negotiations, but about how deeply a bomb could burrow into a mountain. There were graphics showing blast radii and charts explaining bunker depth. Analysts calmly debated how many civilian casualties would be considered "acceptable" in a preemptive strike. We learned, without wanting to, how long a B-52 can stay in the air, how midair refueling works, how many minutes it takes for a missile to cross a border.

There was a cold fluency to it all, a normalization of violence disguised as information. I found myself absorbing it like weather - another condition to track, to brace for. The language of war had slipped seamlessly into everyday life, and what was once unthinkable felt suddenly procedural. The public wasn’t being shielded from brutality, we were being briefed.

And having read the latest email from the Times, I hit “next” and in very 2025 fashion, the screen flipped from war to recipe. It was Chef Amy Chaplin’s latest substack. Subject line: Strawberry Tart.

You guys… I don’t really know what happened. But, I just went straight into single point of focus. Lazer-like.

This was it. I was going to make this tart. This tart, is what I was going to make.

But if I make this tart, I’m going to want to have people over to eat it. If people are coming over, shouldn’t we just… turn it into a party?

Me: Strawberry Tart Party at our apartment on Wednesday?
Brooke: IN!!!!
Jaycee: Why is Wednesday so far away?
Me: Dress code: strawberry.
Brooke and Jaycee: Pinterest board —> started.

Please note: at no point did anyone say - Nat, what even IS a strawberry tart party? What does that even mean?

No. It was just: Where, when, and what are we wearing?

This to me, is of course, a very high form of friendship. Real friends take your completely absurd, left-field ideas, and they ELEVATE them. Real friends don’t question your bizarreness, they fan those flames.

And as Sunday became Monday, Monday became Tuesday, and Tuesday became Wednesday, what became clear was that somehow, in this completely surreal week, we all kind of… needed this tart party?

a snapshot of real friendship

As I unpacked strawberry plates, napkins, cups, and yes - even strawberry dog bandanas, I started to replay scenes from Waiting For Godot in my head. Do you guys remember that play? Samuel Beckett, written in 1948, a French existentialist response to WW2. A search for meaning in a seemingly meaning-stripped time.

In Waiting for Godot, the characters wait, talk, perform, struggle, and wait some more, for no apparent point or utilitarian purpose. They wait for salvation, they wait for direction, they wait for anything to give shape to their time. And in the meantime, they do absurd things: wear ill-fitting hats, invent pointless games, talk in circles. Not to escape the world’s meaninglessness, but to insist on remaining within it. It’s bleak, yes, but also laced with a strange kind of hope, or at least a quiet defiance.

There was something about throwing this strawberry tart party in the shadow of these apocalyptic headlines that felt like a similar absurd kind of hope. Except in this play, it tilts toward joy instead of Vladimir and Estragon’s despair.

There I was, standing in line to buy a tart pan, because no, I’ve never made anything that justified owning a tart pan, when a line from Godot floated back to me, uninvited, like a ghost from my college thesis:

ESTRAGON: We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist?

That was it.

Very simply, having this tart party on the books and in the calendar for Wednesday gave me, and I think all of us, some thing to look forward to. Some thing to get excited about. No one here thinks that throwing a tart party was changing the world. Not by a long shot. But it was a way of affirming life, even in the face of its absurdity. Of saying yes to beauty. Of finding joy not after the bleakness, but inside it.

And honestly, it was exactly the kind of simple joy, sweet absurdity, and low-stakes existentialism we all seemed to need. Everyone showed up with full hearts and zero irony, ready to make this utterly pointless, completely perfect thing happen. Kev’s got the picnic blanket, you’ve got the bag of tableware that looks like Strawberry Shortcake went on a bender, and of course I’ve got the tart. We were committed.

I mean, just look at how seriously we showed up, for a party of four, for something delicious and ephemeral, gone in a blink. And please, a moment to appreciate Kevin’s lewk? And yes, that is a strawberry apron + leopard jacket. Who knew?