Elie Andersen, Communication and Community

Elie Andersen is a community organizer and communication specialist who, amongst many other things, helps run Garden3D and Index, from NYC.

APOSSIBLE™ is a non-profit bringing psychologists, technologists, artists and creatives together to explore how technology can better support creativity and human fulfillment. In this ongoing interview series we’re discovering what people value, what makes their lives fulfilling, and what kinds of relationships to technology they already cherish.

1. What is a ritual, practice, or routine in your life that is important for your psychological wellbeing and/or fulfillment? Why?

Every Saturday morning, I leave the house at ten and walk an hour to the farmer’s market in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. I time it this way so I can stream The New Yorker Radio Hour on WNYC, which is a program hosted by the New Yorker editor David Remnick. Each week, Remnick speaks with someone interesting. Maybe an author, a correspondent of the magazine, an artist opening an exhibition or releasing an album. Most recently he interviewed Senator Reverend Raphael Warnock on his relationship between service through religion and service through government.

I walk through the park, where on a Saturday morning in summer there are usually already a dozen barbecues being staged, with great aluminum trays soon to be filled with chicken. Maybe setup is underway for a musical performance in the amphitheater. There might be tents under which representatives of NYC’s Health & Hospitals, Sanitation, and Parks Departments are ready to disperse information the old fashioned way. On the main green, people lie on yoga mats with their eyes closed, while more parents than children stand around the 3 year-old soccer program. Little league practice is in full swing, and some of the kids can actually hit. The dog park teems. Friends with hangovers tuck into bacon egg and cheeses. Girls call their moms.

Continuing on, I pass gardens in various stages of bloom or rest. Restaurant porters spray bar mats with hoses on the sidewalk. Neighbors heave bags or roll carts toward the laundromat. The line at the diner where the food is bad stretches around the corner. The original vendors of found objects are now accompanied by sellers of vintage clothing, handmade soaps, and antique glassware.

At last at the market. I take out my headphones and weave through the strollers and dogs on leashes. The dairy guy, who’s fat and bearded, has different politics than his downstate customers. I know this because I heard him discussing his opinions in platitudes with a guy buying milk a few years ago. They parted amicably, the customer said “see you next week.”

It was at the market where I first got the news, in a text from my dad, that the election had been called for Biden. I blurted out "they called it for Biden," in the line for sourdough. By the time I’d made it to the corner, throngs of people had already stopped traffic to celebrate, and the owner of the wine store up the street put a case of gruêt on the sidewalk for all to pour into open mouths.

I did a produce distribution at Meditating for Black Lives gatherings during the George Floyd protests of 2020, raising money and placing wholesale orders with S&SO, a farm in Rockland County. Now at his stand, with the showstopping arrangements of radishes and carrots, Greg and I chat while he rings me up.

The cheese and pork stands are a rip-off, but sometimes I indulge. The fish stand is highway robbery. The stand selling salad greens by the pound had a flood a couple years back, and the guy who runs it hasn’t been the same since, but his pea shoots are sweet as ever. The girl who works the stand selling hydroponic lettuces is someone I know I’d be friends with if we’d met in college.

Carrying my food for the week, I wade through the brunch crowd toward Lafayette where I catch the bus home. I think this is civilization at its best.

2. What is a human-made creation that brings out the best in you? Why?

I feel dignified by most of the tools available to me in my modern urban life. My dishwasher indulges my love of entertaining by letting me savor the evening’s end without scrubbing every dirty pan and polishing every empty glass. My birth control enables me to pursue a life that’s not currently defined by parenthood. The human cultivation of bananas, coffee, nuts, vegetables, grains, etc. allows me to eat and drink what I like when I feel like it.

It is not lost on me that I live at the apex of comfort, and that my human experience involves less physical hardship than basically anyone who’s ever been alive before me. Because of the ingenuity, mechanization, industrialization, and marketing of the tools that compose modern middle-class life in the US, and my own participation in the capitalist system that makes it all run, I have more time and energy to pursue leisure, culture, and my relationships to friends and family than a woman of my means had at any other time in history.

But the systems I appreciate most in this moment are systems for public transportation. As I write this, I’m on a train from Basel to Paris. Having traveled by tram to the train, train from the plane, subway to the plane, and from bus to the subway, I feel it’s truly one of the greatest accomplishments of humankind for someone else to be taking care of getting me around from place to place, while I’m free to wax poetic on the role of technology in my life.

When I was younger, I tried to avoid public transit at all costs, begging my parents to pick me up so I wouldn’t have to take the bus, or hitching rides into the city from the suburbs so as to avoid the commuter train. I’d always take the train in the wrong direction in a new city, and god help me even attempting to catch a bus.

As I’ve generally become more literate toward the workings of the world, my anxiety toward public transportation has morphed into a deep gratitude for the time I don’t have to spend in traffic. I now see public transportation as one of the most benevolent, logical advancements we humans have made in service to one another, and am grateful to be able to trust that there will always be a way to get where I’m going.

3. When do you cherish the slow or hard way of doing something? Why?

Since opening Index, I’ve been reconsidering my relationship to timekeeping. Now that we operate a physical space, many of my meetings are in-person again, though some are still on video. The nature of timekeeping is different in these two contexts: When guests arrive for in-person meetings, they may be 5 minutes early or late. But in the time leading up to virtual meetings, the clock is omnipresent in the top right corner of our peripherals. Reminders pepper the sides of our screens in 10-minute intervals. To be late or to be early is difficult.

The parameters of virtual meetings are much more defined, while in-person meetings flow at the pace of conversation. On days when an in-person meeting is followed by a virtual meeting, I find my focus drifting from the conversation to wonder whether I’ve lost track of time, if I’ll be late to the next.

For my birthday, my boyfriend bought me a small analog watch with a gold-rimmed face and black leather strap so I could keep time in in-person meetings without needing a digital device on hand.

Now, when I glance for the time, it’s more of a vibe than an exact number. Almost five. A little after ten. I’m trying to break the habit of reaching for my phone to look at the time, using the watch instead. I’m practicing letting the mind wander when I arrive at a restaurant and the friend I’m meeting isn’t there yet. Who cares if it’s 7:03. She’s not late, I just have a little more time to be here now. I’m turning embodied, imprecise, emotional time-keeping into a luxury in an age when our every digital imprint is timestamped.

4. What is something you appreciate or long for from the past? Why?

As a woman, it’s difficult for me to feel like I missed out on any aspect of life for living too late. Though women have transcended oppression since the beginning of time, and though the world we live in today is still shadowed by the patriarchy, I can’t imagine living in a time where pain and suffering were such an unassailable part of the female experience.

This year I was diagnosed with endometriosis, a disease for which there was no name when my foremothers were doubled over with cramps. Now it’s suspected that 1 in 10 women may have it. A world without Advil is not a world I long for.