I’m writing this essay at 6:37 pm on a grey July evening, wrapped in a towel. An auspicious start. I’ve been taking these weird micro-baths where I make the water scalding hot and salty like the sea (perhaps I am enacting some fantasy in which I myself am a piece of spaghetti???) and then I submerge myself the second it’s bearable, sweat out until I get dizzy and start seeing stars, then drain the bath while dousing myself with cold water from a giant plastic bottle that I should, probably, be drinking from instead. Sometimes I sprinkle the tub with rose petals that I bought in bulk some point during the second lockdown, and the petals make the water smell amazing but they’re impossible to get out of the tub once it’s drained. They just stick to the ceramic and bleed out little acidic blots of magenta. It looks really cool but it is, admittedly, not particularly fun to clean up.
Anyway the whole thing takes about eighteen minutes from bath-fill to towel-dry and of course it’s entirely irresponsible — somehow more wasteful than if I was one for long soaks — but it’s where my best thinking gets done, and certainly on a day like this. Something about contrasts. Something about water and heat and air.
I want to write, today, in this towel, about irresponsibility, which is a concept that I think is having a bit of a re-brand right now, which is a shame because I personally love the original. For example. Last night at dinner — an objectively perfect dinner, everyone ordered beautifully, the air was breezy and warm, there was mozzerella garlic bread for the table, and good friends and good gossip and an ice bucket and tiramisu — I ordered an Irish coffee, god knows why, we all did, except for J. who wisely declined. But then the waitress came by with those divine little glasses that look like calla lilies and she left the bottle of limoncello on the table and it did seem, the way she did it, like we were being let in on something. Like we needed — lest we be rude! — to finish it.
Well. I’m 29. I didn’t sleep a jot. Around 4 in the morning as the pollution turned orange and pretty outside, my husband woke up too and we laughed: what morons we were! Irish coffee! Limoncello! The irresponsibility of it. Delicious. So stupid. Never again. Clean diets from hereout, promise, promise. Though we both know that given the chance we’d bottle that evening up and drink it again and again.
Irresponsibility! “Irresponsibility looks so good on Margaux,” Sheila Heti wrote in the first chapter of How Should A Person Be. I think about that line often. Irresponsibility looks so good on some people—maybe most people? How do you know if you’re one of them? Some people, in their moment of irresponsibility, obtain a glow of youth that no amount of diligent face-washing, SPF, and serums can touch. Others just reek of metaphysical cigarettes. It’s so hard to tell which one you’ll be.
And then there’s the whole YOLO economy business. This idea that hoards of individuals are making the decision to quit their jobs and, I don’t know, move to the Dakotas, or ‘go traveling abroad’ (okay), or ‘pursue’ their ‘truth’—I mean of course it’s all very nice, very good even, but that’s not irresponsibility, and some of them want credit like it is! Making a calculated risk with an eye towards finding a sustainable income stream through some ‘non-traditional’ means (which are all becoming more traditional than a 9-to-6, at this point) is not delicious irresponsibility! I wonder if you, reading this, know what I’m saying. Maybe I just want some credit for my hangover. Maybe I just worry about all the stupid trend pieces being written about my generation to make up for our complete lack of unmonetized joie de vivre.
Anyway. Irresponsibility. On Monday a crew of movers, almost certainly hungover due to the football and its whole business of coming home, will rise and shine and arrive here in my flat, to whose walls I am still desperately clinging, and they will efficiently and determinedly pack up this entire space, and some of the boxes will be marked “APARTMENT” and most of them will be marked “STORAGE” and I’ve done so little to practically prepare. I put some books in a box. I stuffed my late summer clothes in a suitcase. I scanned my passport. In the moment where responsibility would help, my lists and skincare routine have both failed me: I have no idea what’s going on, and I have no idea how we acquired all this stuff, all these things which we have, I know, the privilege of being responsible for.
When I was younger, in my early 20s, I prided myself on being able to travel with so few clothes they’d fit in a Zip-Lock bag. I never checked a suitcase and my carry-on was always just books and travel-sized Evian mist and a fistful of underwear. During that period I worried less because there was so little that could go permanently wrong, or at least that’s what it felt like.
One morning in Oxford a man who would not become my husband left for work while I stayed in his room, touching the spines of his books, not daring to steal one like he’d told me I should. (“You should stay, and steal a book.”) I remember how thin I looked in the mirror on his wall, turning to the side to see if it was an optical illusion, marveling at the way I could shrink into an efficient piece of luggage, a carry-on version of myself. His laptop was open to Spotify — logged into some account under another girl’s name, Fiona, it stuck with me, given the Shrek connotations — and I felt clever and sparkling when I pulled up a Frank Sinatra song, “Call Me Irresponsible,” and left it to play on repeat, the first thing he’d hear when he came back that night. The opening hum still makes me feel it, whatever it is.
He was older, but not much older than I am now, which does put things in perspective. I was below the American drinking age. He’d do things like wake up and take a swig from an open bottle of wine on his bedside table, but then he’d do other things, too, like tell me stories from The Master and Margarita which, having paid so little attention in Russian Literature, I’d entirely missed. The devil comes to town, in case you missed it too. I was grateful to be reminded. But of course things went the way these things go. He could keep nothing so he made claims instead, big claims about all there was under the sun, all the Big Important Things that I did not yet know.
But come on. Of course I knew.
If you don’t, it’s something else entirely. It’s oblivion. How do you keep a box of paper-thin glassware from shattering on a cargo ship? How do you leave a room for the last time? How many containers simply get lost at sea?
Recklessness, stupidity—it isn’t enough. To be irresponsible, you have to know.
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Responsible Recommendations
“You need to have a circle of eyes, many pairs of eyes arranged all around your head and a skin that is osmotic. At least that’s the kind of novelist I want to be.” “And in the theatre, I want to change my seat. Just so I can step on everybody's feet.” “How might our relationship to Jewishness change if we asked not how to preserve it forever, but instead what it means for us now, and how to pass that on while understanding that it, like us, will someday die and be forgotten?” [Midsommar x Lorde.] “Was this misery or joy?” “Can you imagine? The rest of us are dying of thirst, and your father keeps pouring water on himself, like he needs to take a shower in the middle of a forest.” (That last one is by Anthony, who I loved.)
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Thank you for reading Sifting! Why not forward these ramblings and recs to a friend? Or reply with the most irresponsible thing you’ve ever done… I’d love to hear it. xx
got into a stranger's car after a night of drinking with my best friend for a ride home. he turned out to be the son of my dad's co-worker, so all was good, but definitely one of the dumbest and most irresponsible things i've ever done
a push-ups competition with jonathan on a street after many beers in front of many people is one of the funniest that comes to mind :)