After sipping a latte, having a quiet morning, and experiencing absolutely no relaxation at all, 25-year-old Tara Smith realized on Tuesday that she is most at peace when she’s in a wide-open meadow or wrapped up in a five-hour TV binge.
“I either have to be frolicking on an Austrian mountaintop singing ‘The Hills Are Alive,’ or I have to be nine episodes deep in The Hills,” she explained. “There is literally no in-between.”
“And you know what?” Smith added. “Maria von Trapp would have loved Hulu.”
Studies show that the lengthy list of things that Smith thinks she does for self-care — like taking long showers, running on a treadmill, cooking dinner, window shopping, drawing in her sketchbook, and playing piano — actually don’t do anything for her at all.
This is because they don’t take place in leafy green pastures in the middle of nowhere and they are not all-night binges of random-ass shows on Netflix. Nothing else will do.
“When I’m stressed, I just picture myself completely immersed in nature, with the birds chirping and the grass rustling,” Smith said. “Or I turn off all the lights, burrow under my covers, and hit ‘play’ on Grace & Frankie season two. Either works like a charm.”
Smith’s discovery did not come as a surprise to anyone who knows her.
“Yeah, that explains a lot,” said her pal Hailey Adams. “We were at the Met last week, and she paused in front of some Monet painting of a sun-speckled French field and was like, ‘Let’s go there right now.’ I was like, ‘Tara, you’re dog-sitting my poodle in Brooklyn tomorrow.’”
Okay, but has a poodle ever tossed your hair as gently as the wind does over an open meadow?
“And then there was the time that we went out for brunch, and she didn’t seem to be getting anything out of it,” Adams continued. “But then I mentioned New Girl, and suddenly she was dying to talk about some random shit that happened in season six.”
Maybe that’s because she’d just watched all of season six in her windowless living room while feeling the deepest, most profound contentment that had ever entered her mortal corpse.
At press time, Smith was watching Gossip Girl on her phone as she stretched out in Central Park, content in the knowledge that this was the single best moment of her life.
