The Physics of Not Giving a Shit

After the police took Tara Monroe’s driver’s license—she’d refused the breathalyzer following a Waka Flocka concert in Texas—she did not call a cab. She did not download a rideshare app. She went to her parents’ garage, pulled out the pink battery-powered Barbie Jeep she’d presumably last ridden at age seven, and drove it to class.

Top speed: five miles per hour. The vehicle: bright pink, built for small children, equipped with a plastic steering wheel and the structural integrity of a garden ornament. The driver: a junior studying industrial engineering at Texas State University, apparently unbothered.

Campus lost its mind immediately. People filmed her, tweeted her, declared her a legend in real time. And I get it. There’s something clarifying about someone who, faced with a genuinely humiliating situation, responds not with shame but with total commitment to the bit. She didn’t slink around. She drove the Barbie Jeep—there and back, every day. Her only comment to the press: bikes are just too hard.

What I keep thinking about is the gap between how the situation was supposed to go—contrition, inconvenience, a lesson learned—and how it actually went. Cool only works in one direction: you can’t manufacture it by caring about how it looks, only by not caring. Tara Monroe wasn’t trying to be cool. She just needed to get to class.