Letter Of Recommendation
On "cultivating an eccentricity" and sinning for yourself.
So I originally pitched this week’s post to the New York Times magazine as a “Letter Of Recommendation” for, basically, cigarettes? The working headline was: Keep My Mother's Cooking—It's Her Bad Habits I Need Now, which, now that I think about it, sounds like a disconcertingly earnest sponcon campaign for A Bad Mom’s Quarantine. Weird how no one picked this up!
I framed it as “a personal ode to less happy memories and the solace and guidance they can provide in These Uncertain Times.” Back then (in May) I started all of my pitch emails, “I hope you're coping as well as any of us!” which feels, if nothing else, right for the moment, if you consider a “moment” to be a unit of time that’s simply interminable until it’s over. The idea was to “confront the kitchen as a source of shame, where my greatest cultural inheritance is maybe the microwave,” and then pivot hard to smoking, drinking, and crying — still the holy trinity of catharsis in captivity, even eights months removed.
The kitchen angle was admittedly weak, the smoking angle not significantly stronger. While I do indeed suck at cooking and definitely get that from my mother, the letters of recommendation usually have a takeaway. In this case that would have amounted to “buy cigarettes,” I guess, even though my mom quit smoking when I was in elementary school. And I actually hate smoking, which makes me uncool, or at least unfuckable, so really what we’re talking about here is taking solace in an affectation. Or, as Carrie Bradshaw once rhapsodized, “It’s like she’s consciously trying to cultivate an eccentricity so people won’t notice she’s completely devoid of personality.”
Locking myself in the bathroom with a cigarette, a glass of wine and the dulcet tones of Maggie Rogers is my personal brand of Margot Tenenbaum cosplay, yes, but also an innocuous way of cocooning, ashing and sipping and soaking my way through an hour, which is a unit of time that I know has passed because the bathroom now stinks, my fingertips have pruned, and I’m buzzed. It is a stasis of my own making that I then attempt to unmake with a few lazy spritzes of Coqui Coqui’s Flor de Naranjo linen spray, the tobacco smoke and orange blossom molecules caking together in our gently yellowed poly-blend shower curtain.
When I was a kid, I must’ve been about six, I hid my mom's cigarettes. I thought I was helping her, saving her from herself. (I also remember deploying this tactic once to “help” a beloved cousin. I don’t know where I got the idea — maybe Harriet the Spy?) My mom would’ve been about my age now. She’d never been a regular smoker, but it felt like a vice that needed stamping out and I guess I loved to put my foot down. It seems sweet in hindsight, maybe, but less so when you read between the lines: that I found out where she kept her cigarettes, then snuck into her room when she wasn’t there and stole them. It wouldn’t be the last time I stole from my parents.
She inevitably kicked the habit on her own, for her own good reasons. But I wonder if, in her early thirties with two young kids, she’d maybe found herself in a stasis of her own making and was just looking for a way to pass the time. A way to know that it had passed, and in measurable units that didn’t have to be counted out in fucking Lucky Charms. Or, I’m just brazenly making the case for this as a formative instance of childhood conflict that legitimizes the way I’m handling my Very Adult Anxieties. Maybe I’m consciously trying to cultivate an eccentricity so that people won’t notice: I’m only coping as well as any of us. Now that, I recommend.
HOUSEKEEPING: Apparently my mom also purchased SKIMS last month, aka machine learning has officially turned me into her — or both of us into Kardashians?
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