A Sink

October 10th, 2023

I am not an adult. I am legally an adult. I ostensibly do a lot of adulting — I cook & bake for two, I clean, I clogged a sink and then outsourced the unclogging part of the job just last week — and still, I am not an adult: a fact I believe on the basis of how ill-equipped I am to adult properly. We’re warned (but not enough; never enough) about how lonely being an adult is. This life of cooking, cleaning, speaking French, doing various projects, getting up late & staying in shape, it’s quite solitary. Don’t get me wrong, it’s calm and refreshing, and I much prefer it to doing school while burnt out. Still, solitary.

When I was 17, I lived a similar (but self-designed) life, on the basis that I figured if I routinely overcame the discomfort of staying with my thoughts and staying alone, confidence would bubble up like water over heat. Up until recently, I conceived of that time as the most productive (albeit solitary & perhaps saddening) period of my life. Yet recently, I’ve begun to think of that time more as an ascetic, aesthetic pursuit rather than something intrinsically valuable. That might be something worth thinking more & more about in this era of social media and in the context of arrogance. Does one listen to jazz for pleasure or for the pleasure of appearing to listen to jazz?

I don’t mean to sound unhappy. I think this period of life is natural, and just requires some adjusting. In fact, I’m quite grateful for quite a few things here: the good weather, the fact that I can cook with relative confidence now, Aretha Franklin.

Some other observations: baguettes are unfathomably delicious here, and deserve to be a class C drug; air fryers can make decent — perhaps not spectacular, but decent — baked goods; cooking to music is generally quite good, cooking to something slow, smooth, and soulful is something else out of this world.