What sort of self-respecting adult woman doesn’t know how to roll a joint? An adult woman like Sharon Lam.
If you are like me then you will have, for much of your life, based your definition of an independent woman on Destiny’s Child’s ‘Independent Woman Part I’. An independent woman is one who buys her own diamonds, her own rings, shoes, clothes, the rocks she rocks, the watch she wears, her house, her car – because she depends on her. While unfailingly singing along to this aspirational treatise over the years on CD, Windows Media Player, iTunes and Spotify, I have felt the satisfaction of being able to sing certain lines louder. The watch I’m wearing? I BOUGHT IT, I confidently sing, flashing my Casio. The car I’m driving? I bought it…(here my circa 2015 learner’s licence and I go back to whispering).
But the song came out in the year 2000, when Beyonce was an impossible NINETEEN years old, and I know now that there is more to an independent woman than having a watch and mortgage. A baby could have a mortgage! There are probably heaps of babies who have mortgages for tax reasons! No, the true signifier of an independent woman lies not in the ownership of leaky houses nor blood diamonds, but in weed. A joint rolled by herself, with weed bought by herself – surely today, that is what makes an independent woman an independent woman: a joint of one’s own.
If I am ever to become the independent woman that I have made up in my head, then I will have to buy my own weed, “it’s time to stop holding mummy’s hand while buying drugs”, to quote Abbi from TV show Broad City. This moment is a menses of sort, triggered not by hormones but self-realisation. For Abbi, it was triggered by the discovery that her weed came couriered via her friend’s vagina. For me, it is life’s never-ending river of guilt, its white-water rapids roaring that I only ever take and never give, including drugs.
On the spectrum of dealers, you have places under the Dezeen dispensaries tag on one end, and your local questionable tinny house on the other. But alas, I do not live in a legalised state, and know approximately two and a half people in this city, none of them drug dealers. Where do you begin? Is the shoes on powerlines thing true? Is the Ikea thing true (apparently in Hong Kong, there are dealers who sell from various sofas in the display houses of Ikea, hiding amongst napping geriatrics)? Do you bring cash or is it all digital now? What’s the most ethical way to buy drugs in a world of racist policing, a world with cases like Brittney Griner’s? Also how much do you buy? One gram? A hundred grams?
Because it is four degrees outside, I decide to focus on the joint-rolling part of independence. After all, buying weed but not being able to make it smokeable would be like buying Kobe beef and not having a mouth. There is some weed already in my flat, bought off of a teenager from Telegram by my drug-literate flatmate and they are out doing an overnight shift. It’s the perfect time to roll a joint completely independently. I briefly contemplated looking up a tutorial, of which there are endless variations. Beginner joints, perfect joints, tight vs. loose, ones that are braided, cross-shaped, finely heart-tipped, captioned “feel like the world needs this tip right now more than ever (prayer hands emoji)”. But like a child who has spent their life watching someone tie their shoelaces, I truly believed I could tie my own metaphorical drug-shoes, sans guidance. How hard could it be?
First I cut up the weed, which my flatmate usually does with the kitchen scissors, which I know because the kitchen scissors are never in the kitchen and should be renamed the weed scissors. Bits of it get everywhere. I feel like I’m trimming the pubes of a small bush creature. How much am I meant to cut? It seems both like a lot and not enough. Then I take a half deconstructed cigarette and sprinkle bits of tobacco on top of the inconsistently cut weed, much like a fancy waiter with an oversized pepper grinder.
I rip off a bit of a Barcelona tapas bar business card, for a bit of metropolitan glamour. I only recently learnt that you have to use a bit of card as a mouthpiece for joints. The card can’t be too thick or too thin, and I am told that this establishment’s card is the perfect GSM. My flatmate took about 10. Is this a Nathan Fielder business strategy by the tapas bar?
Once I have my cute little cylinder, I return to the weed, which I have been cutting over a piece of paper. I planned to fold this into a funnel of sorts and neatly distribute in a line across the rolling paper. This does not happen and I lose about half of it on my desk. I scoop it back onto the paper, adding eraser shavings, nail clippings, and Ritz crumbs into the mix. Spicy. I lose even more when I begin attempting to roll it up, and as I see the filling scattered everywhere except for on the rolling paper, I have a flashback to every time I’ve tried teaching a white person how to fold dumplings, only now I am the white person.
I try to mimic the same sort of shuffling-rolling motion that I’ve seen people do, which finesses the joint into a neat, tight roll. Mine does not do this. I only finesse more of it on to the table. Eventually I have a sort of tubey shape and I poke the bits that have fallen out into the end with a chopstick, which I’m sure is exactly how Snoop Dogg does it too. At this point I have spent about 20 minutes on my little project. The cardie is not sitting right at all, it’s sort of bent, and I can barely twist the end together. It is the world’s most pathetic joint, but at least it is mine. Sort of.
The next day, I come home to my flatmate, and I ask them if they liked my gift. They tell me that they saw it and “had to” take it apart. I am shocked. My debut joint never saw the light of a flame! It sank before leaving the harbour! Its maiden voyage, dashed! My flatmate registers my disappointment and transforms into a compassionate doctor after a high risk surgery, and says that there were “too many air pockets” and “it would have not ever worked”.
It seems I am no closer to being an independent woman. A joint of my own is as faraway as being a mama who profit dollars. I google “Does Beyonce roll her own joints”, which I already am certain she doesn’t need to. I couldn’t find a solid answer, but I found the next closest thing, which is learning that her husband Jay-Z has a luxury marijuana line, with hand-rolled joints selling for USD$50 each.
Perhaps it’s time to accept that I will never be one of those self-actualised women who roll their own joints with their own weed in the same way I have accepted I cannot be Lydia Ko. People who have a hookup hold a special position within their friend groups, and without their naive weed-laymen friends, who would they be? A leader needs followers, a conductor needs an orchestra. In accepting my inability to roll, I am maintaining social order, one secondhand spliff at a time.