LIT

ON IDLENESS

Live life, breathe air / I know somehow we’re gonna get there / And feel so wonderful

Your uncharacteristic purchase of what is, ostensibly, a luxury item—the installable bidet feature for your toilet (the TUSHY)—happened suddenly, as part of a pledge to take real initiative over your life. But it means you no longer spend six minutes obsessively wiping, which consequently reduces the overall time you spend in the bathroom, which in turn makes obsolete a large percentage of the apps on your phone. The TUSHY expedites your shitting process so dramatically that you now no longer have any time to look at Tinder, and you find yourself swiping through the app on the way to the bathroom down the hall, just a few paces away. Sometimes on breaks from Zoom class—your professor suggests you rest your eyes—you simply transition your eyes to another screen, blankly swiping left and right until there is no one left in your radius.

You find that your thumb instinctively knows the app’s placement on your phone screen. You hear NPR or The Atlantic or your aunt warn against the neuro-chemical addictive properties of apps like Tinder. Hearing these warnings is as fatiguing as the neuro-chemical addiction itself; you know the concern to be valid but the app has not adversely affected your life materially enough for you to turn away. You rely on the sense of distance you maintain from its binary parameters, like ‘of course this isn’t me, its tacit rules make no sense.’ For men, Tinder is the college campus’ “online red light district,” where girls are spectacle and sex is to be solicited; for women, Tinder is “vibe confirmation software,” where you can check if the looks you were getting from that one person in class meant anything. You use it to both celebrate and eliminate your romantic idle time: to revel in the possibilities, but also to seek refuge from the arena. Mostly, you want something to happen.

Or at least something to change. Every six months or so you switch deodorants, to switch things up, to mark time, and as a result different smells are now projected onto seasons for you: October is the soft, ripe Dove Cucumber scent that your first boyfriend used to wear, April is the Arm and Hammer that’s supposed to be unscented but smells like cedar wood, December the Tom’s of Maine that is unnameably cursed. The hope is that these pivots give momentum to the wheel of the year and keep it spinning forward. Up to this point it has seemed like success is mobility: some type of trajectory, some type of movement. Taking control over your life means making it go faster, getting more done. So you’ve planned your life around things happening. Your day takes shape around a meeting at 2 PM, your year takes shape around a new partner, your career takes shape around a mounting sequence of jobs. Maybe you clear out periods before and after each meeting, relationship, job to prepare or decompress, but these periods are transitionary—the empty connective tissue of your life. The spaces in between are meant to be expedited and minimized: a shit, a meal, a hookup. Sometimes you are successful in accelerating these moments, and you feel them like the transitions in sitcoms: cut to exterior, cue music. You realize you’re sometimes trying to reflect the pace of the shows you watched as a kid—the correct number of jokes, of subplots. It was thrilling in middle school. In iCarly, each scene is contained in a browser window; a disembodied mouse navigates around the screen as scenes are periodically opened and dragged, closed and trashed.

This is how you feel casting through a handful of potential lovers during the 15-second walk to the bathroom, and it’s how you feel queuing up 10 minutes of music for the walk home, or spending time using a calendar to plot out the chunks of time you will spend completing homework. This is what initiative is: it is initiating more things. You buy a wrist watch on eBay because an ex told you that when you look at your phone to check the time, you end up ignoring the actual time and instead scrolling through your notifications. And that buying a watch will give you intention and moderation.

This is what your daily walks are for. In iCarly, the characters never leave their apartment-suite set. Since quarantine, your life has begun to feel alarmingly similar (though there are no spaghetti tacos in your apartment) so you make sure to include scenes in your life that take place outside. It sometimes makes you feel like an alien simulating a human’s life, curating it to maintain the illusion of a healthy life: eat these vitamins, acquire these Tinder matches, walk around outside.

You are driving and listening to music with the windows closed under a canopy of skeletal trees. The “34+35 (Remix)” by Ariana Grande features Doja Cat and Megan Thee Stallion and it is perfect. Seriously, it is perfect—it is the best pop song you’ve heard in a long time, and it is irresistible in the way that pop songs are every so often. “Uptown Funk” was like this, and you can even remember the first time you heard it on the radio in 2014 at night in the backseat of your dad’s car. You felt instantly it would be a contemporary classic. “34+35 (Remix)” brings the same feeling—one of ineffable joy and satisfaction, clarity and hope. It is so immediate, so memorable, that you can imagine yourself feeling nostalgic for it in the future, remembering hearing it in the car. It feels classic, like the next thing is here, important, now, and will continue. It reminds you that new classics are generated constantly and continuously, that the wheel of pop music spins forward. As you leave your car, you are humming it.

Now, at every opportunity, you want to listen to “34+35 (Remix).” It is promising and instantly rewarding like a new love, a new match, a Super Like. There is potential for its complete integration into your life. You play it for your roommates, your friends. You queue it up for the walk home. It fills space, but substantively, and memorably. It becomes your theme song for these few months, and soon it enters the canon of your life and attaches itself to the other sensory information of this period: the evening light in your living room, your Women’s Degree deodorant.

In middle school, you flirted with wearing AXE as you learned how to discern your own personal style and tastes, as you learned to communicate and articulate your ideas. You remember an English teacher demanding that you and your classmates avoid “like,” “uh,” and “literally” when you spoke publicly. That these are verbal impediments that slow one down, wasting breath and time. That they dull the edge of one’s idea. That one should speak deliberately, with intention and purpose. At that time, and still now, you thought this was pointless and offensive in its vision of an ideal public speaker. You’ve always used your words as a way to articulate your thoughts in real time, to discover the contours of the next idea as it forms in the distance, approaches, and passes.

You continue to swipe through Tinder, in an elevator or waiting in line, just to make sure, just to gauge the potential, to see if maybe the accumulating matches will eventually weigh enough to throw the wheel into motion. But the matches add up, and there is no traction. Ultimately, the generative force is not in the confirmation of a vibe, it is not in the purchase of a new scent, not in knowing the iCarly episode synopsis, not in the expediency of your daily tasks or the acceleration of the plot of your life. Since the pandemic, it has not been hard to find occupations, it has been hard to find and accept idleness; it has not been hard to find intimacy, it has been hard to find casualness. The relationships you’ve lost are the ones that were the least remarkable, and the interactions you miss are the informal, awkward, transitory moments: as you file into a class, as you order food in line, as you wash hands at the sinks in the bathroom. While walking down a small side street, you accidentally meet eyes with a passerby walking parallel to you on the other side of the street. You both look away and look back because it’s useless to pretend that neither of you saw the other. So you wave, and they wave, and you can see their eyes crinkle, and you keep walking apart from each other, and you turn at the next block, to go home, to end the uncertainty of the potential new person, to stop the buzzing feeling in your fingers, to get back to what you want to do and what you need to do, to excise the time you spend shitting or waiting between loves, to the next music cue, and to exercise total agency over your life, get your vibes in order, to take initiative as you peddle your year forward, like a bicycle, gaining momentum, picking up speed.

ASHER WHITE RISD’22 needs to empty her purse of a bunch of gum wrappers and crumbs.