Inside, Outside, USA

Two weeks ago, I celebrated one of the first properly hot days of the year with a Thai place’s discount lunch. I’ve never understood why spicy food is recommended for hot days, but I like to think it’s so people can blame their sweat on the weather, not the spicy basil fried rice.

Shaded under a tree, I thought the outdoor tables might be more temperate than those inside, where there was probably too much or too little air conditioning. Plus, now that we know about how much of other people’s spit floats around, you know, it’s hard to go back to being inside if it’s nice out.

I admired the artificial turf under my table when I bent down to pick up a dropped napkin. I ordered my lunch, and just thinking about it made me start sweating. Though I sat right by the doorway, sheets of green-tinted plastic shaped like a corrugated iron roof enclosed the “outdoor” area. No breeze to be found, I felt like I could watch the condensation appear on my glass of water like a sped-up nature video. The heat bounced off the turf, and I incubated like a pot plant in this patio-cum-greenhouse.

Prior conversations about whether seating counted as outside or not were predicated on pre-vaccine, super-spreading aversion to illness. The discomfort posed by these shacks had heretofore been risk-related and less immediate, but now I stewed in the savanna, not to mention what happened when they brought my food.

One of my earliest vacation memories is from a trip to a cousin’s wedding in Toronto. I didn’t know much about universal healthcare or poutine, but I was pretty sure we were headed to the North Pole. The night before we left, I tossed and turned with fever dreams about polar bears bursting through my window and mauling me, dragging me across this arctic wasteland. I figured we’d get around on sleds and the bride and groom might ice skate down the aisle. I therefore struggled to process the words when my folks explained the hotel in Toronto had a pool.

How could they have a pool in Canada?

Well, it’s half indoors, half outdoors.

Half indoors half outdoors?

Surely they knew that their answer to my question would beget more questions. How could something be both inside and outside? Could you swim between them? How long did you have to hold your breath?

Outside is a less well-defined concept than it might seem. Most conflate outside with fresh air, but a room with big windows and a nice cross-breeze is inside. Others would argue that outside is when there is no roof.

What then to make of Gazebos? What about cities with enough air pollution that the outside air isn’t very fresh at all?

In high school, my family went to Morocco. I remember walking through the Medina in Fes, which is meant to be one of the largest pedestrian areas in the world. Pedestrian areas, to me, always feel kind of inside. The ground is a bit too nice, the furniture looks like it might not be waterproof, it’s always hard to tell.

We passed through a gate, but at first we were certainly still outside. Gradually, however, the street narrowed, and at some point we ended up underneath a roof, though we never passed through a door. Displays of leather goods stood outside stores with no concern for inclement weather. I decided that we had to be inside by this point.

No sooner had this thought crossed my mind than a horn blared, and I stepped out of the way to avoid a couple people sharing a motor scooter. Airports sometimes have golf carts, some arena may host a monster truck rally, but beyond that, inside living should be a vehicle-free experience. Were we outside then? How did the scooter get up the stairs?

These days, between 70th and 71st on the east side of Lexington Avenue, a series of Italian places have set up outdoor seating areas in the street, on the far side of the sidewalk. They all share one roof, which extends from the actual building across the sidewalk to cover the titans of industry as they eat their pasta and pizza.

Pedestrians walking through have to duck and dodge away from waiters spinning past like in a Heineken commercial. I alternate between staring at everybody’s plate, trying to decide who’s who, and hiding my face out of guilt for interrupting these power luncheons. Who are all these people eating expensive meals in the middle of the day?

A defining quality of inside is that things stay where you leave them. The answer to “how’d that get there??” is always “it’s your fault.” Wallet in the fridge? It didn’t walk.

Conversely, it's rare that a fed up parent or babysitter announces “It’s not my job to clean up after you” to a child sowing chaos outside. Outside, there are enough variables between other people, squirrels, wind, cyclists, and thunderstorms that one can’t reliably leave a magazine on the street corner after, say, waiting for a red light, and expect to be able to pick up the same article about fish sticks the next time they have to, say, wait for a red light.

Nobody has ever mopped spilled milk up off a sidewalk. I once dropped a dozen eggs on the sidewalk in Hyannis. We kept walking. A week ago, I found a bookshelf on the street. It was next to a bunch of garbage bags, and it was just about the right size for part of my room, so now it’s holding some of my books and knick-knacks. Outside, stuff moves around.

Therefore, if I see the same set of chicken bones scattered in the same ill-omened pattern next to the entrance to the L three days in a row, am I really outside? Shouldn’t they have moved around by now? What bad events does this portend? If a twelve-year-old’s Oats and Honey Nature Valley Bar crumbs stay on the turf soccer field forever, isn’t that turf kind of inside?

With the onset of summer, it will be more and more pleasant to be outside. Of course, we’re right about at the tipping point where sitting in the sun has become unbearable. Until then, though, I understand that New York at least has fed the meter and pledged to allow the expanded “outdoor” seating areas to stay in their parking spaces, so now we can pray for a breeze while we sit down for dinner and some drinks.

People who spend too much time on the internet will tell one another “Touch grass,” which is shorthand for “put down your phone, close your laptop, go outside, and spend a minute in the actual world, you idiot.” I’ve seen grass inside at a Jamba Juice before, but I don’t think this is meant to be taken literally.

Today, I walked by a restaurant that had installed air conditioners in its outdoor dining area. While one could argue our power plants, airplanes, cows, and cars are doing their own form of air conditioning, using a little gray box to keep people cool outside is a fool’s errand. Inside, we like to think we can control everything, whether it be the light, the temperature, or the sounds. Outside, therefore, is where we relinquish control.

Demanding total control is a recipe for disaster, because inside or out, things come up. Sometimes, though, the unexpected is good. Maybe it’s best to go outside and risk stepping in dog shit for the chance to stumble upon a face-up penny.

At a minimum, we could try to nail down a better definition of outside. Now that’s off my chest, I should go touch grass.