In the 12 years since, things on the internet have changed. People you’ve met 1 time can find you on Facebook. People you’ve never met at all can go through years of your blog posts. Your Twitter. Your YouTube. Your Flickr. People you have never met can know everything you’ve chosen to show them. It’s usually just oddly amusing (there’s a guy on Flickr who apparently REALLY likes my hands), but you see the potential for horror.

In response to this 21st century weirdness, a lot of people have made a lot of things private or “friends only,” but I have never been a huge fan of that. Instead, I came out on the other side of the fence, saying “this is me and I am not ashamed of it. Google all you like.” Who cares about what I say? Basically nobody…but you have to remember that if your stuff is public, it’s OUT THERE. Anyone can see it, and it never goes away. Any potential employer, any new guy you meet at a party, your Sculpt instructor at the Y, the girlfriend of the guy you dated 10 years ago…everyone. On the off chance that someone might be gunning for you, you should cover your ass. If you say that someone is evil incarnate, someone you know is going to copy and paste what you said and email it to that person. If you care if that happens, you probably shouldn’t write those things.

The system worked well. It forced me to be thoughtful about what I said. To always be conscious that the walls have ears. (The walls even have ears you haven’t MET yet. The walls have ears that you will meet at the gym 6 months from now.) In 12 years of blogging, I haven’t regretted a single post. I haven’t had someone email to ask why I’m talking behind their back. I haven’t had someone call me out for anything I’ve written, photographed or video taped. I’ve been ever-conscious that everything I say is public. Very public. GOOGLE public.

But it has also tied my hands.

In my efforts to think things out, be diplomatic, be clear and be unimpeachable, I lost some honesty. I lost the ability to talk about anything. I lost the day-to-day, “here’s my life, here’s my worry, here’s my joy.” For example, you can’t blog about talking a friend through a breakup and how you feel about the possible repercussions of that when that friend’s girlfriend is your Facebook friend. It will hurt her feelings and make the friend angry with you because you have told secrets that are not your own. So you table that blog. And another blog. And another, until you wonder what the hell the point of your blog even IS, since you’re basically just writing articles for the masses. Oh, yes, please. Write a blog about that MOVIE. That’s thrilling. Why don’t you just start a tumblr and post screenshots of text messages and pictures of your food?

I understand that a certain level of privacy can be achieved through Facebook custom publish filters and the like. I also understand that everybody in Nashville knows everybody else and that people talk. I understand even further that not everyone on the average “friend” list is actually your trusted confidante. Sometimes it’s a friend of a friend, or a coworker or any other of a host of people who would love to copy and paste your words and send them to someone who hates you for reasons you don’t know about that may or may not be true.

So, I’m returning to where I started.

I have changed the name and format of my LiveJournal. It is now known as Ritual Shower (what I jokingly call my nightly “de-stress and process” shower) and it is where I sit down each night and process what happened that day. A sort of “think about what you’ve done” that will hopefully lead to more mindful living. A way to take the mass of confusion and emails that is daily life and sit and process it, wrapping each day up in a little bow and putting it to bed.

Ritual Shower posts are friends-only. If you’re on LJ, email me (evilamymauk at gmail) and I’ll add you. If you think we’re good enough friends, we probably are. I’m just filtering out the coworkers, family members and strangers from goth night. The regular blog posts will still be available here, and they will still keep coming. My inner writer still has plenty to say to the faceless mass, and probably always will.

This is my voice and I like it here. I just need to add another dynamic level. A quieter one.

Seriously. I pondered that through an entire grocery trip.

In survival mode, everything just stops while your brain just tries to get through the day. I had nothing to say and nothing to write because there simply hadn’t been a thought in my head that wasn’t about what I did that day. Even my internal dialog had become plot summary. As a side note, I hate plot summary. Conversation should not be like a third grader’s book report. I only want to know what you did so that we can then move on to how you felt about it, how you hope it turns out, or how it fits into your master plan. The big picture.

Anyway, with all this quiet around me during holiday drives, commutes, workouts, etc., I felt my brain open up. It had time to think. To wonder about things. To think of things it wanted to do. To slow down and try to figure things out. I started to give some thought to the nature of love. Like, maybe my relationship fell apart because I just wouldn’t know a man that loved me if he walked up and shook my hand. Maybe I was just THAT cynical.

But no.

I knew that one friend loved me because he listened to me bitch about my job ALL the damn time. There were long stories detailing such riveting topics as paper jams and mail merges, and he listened to every single word of every single one, without interrupting me, acting bored or changing the topic. If memory serves, he would even reach over and mute the tv or pause the DVR so we could talk. That man loved me.

What happened to him? If I wanted to blame him, I’d say that he found a girlfriend and forgot about me. If I told the truth, I’d say I wasn’t that great a friend to him (he supported me, and I’d be like “thanks” and then miss important things like his college graduation) and he finally found a girl who would accept his love properly. I still owe him an apology, and he’s going to get it if I ever manage to track him down.

I knew that another friend loved me because he talked me down from 100 different ledges after a particularly gross breakup. I’d get going on some rant, and he would just stop me with “Amy, this person threw you away. Like trash. Via TEXT. Why are you spending all this time even thinking about him? He should be wiped from the Earth, along with your memory of him.”

He helped me through that breakup and when his breakup came, I legitimately tried. I listened to his understated story of being tossed aside by a girl he thought he would marry. I thought he was fine, because he seemed so calm. I knew that he loved me because I got a chance to beg. To say goodbye. To tell him I loved him. When he killed himself anyway, it changed me forever and I forgot how to be terrified of everything. That man loved me.

I know dad was kind of contractually obligated, but still. There must have been countless times that he gave something up for mom, sis and me. Countless times that he didn’t get to do what he wanted to do because we were the bigger picture. Countless things he couldn’t have because he was squirreling money away. Money that became part of the down payment on my house. My car. My eyes. This is the man that made a goth girl do a mock interview because “I think you’re cheating yourself out of 20 grand a year with that nose ring.” The man who looked at a disheveled 10 year old and made her “have some self respect and iron that shirt.” The man who kept asking “no, really, what ARE your goals?” until I figured out an answer. He loved me enough to not let me get away with anything. He loved me enough to tell me that I could do better until I did better.

I’m still a terribly cynical person. I will check your actions eight ways to Sunday to make sure they’re true. I do this to protect myself.

But, by God, I know when I am loved.
And I never, ever forget it.

I am sitting across from an old friend, trying to do what you’d think would be easy: I’m trying to sit down and figure out what I want. It’s easier said than done. I look at this menu, look at her and realize that few things are really that simple.

All you have to do is sit down, decide what you want and then go after it. Life isn’t like being a vegetarian in a restaurant, where all you have to choose from is salad or french fries. Life is like being Anthony Bourdain: you could have the steak, the fish or you could just have the chef cook up whatever’s living under the fridge. The menu doesn’t have pictures, and you don’t know what the portions are like. How are you supposed to just sit down, figure out what you want and order it? What if it comes and it’s nothing like you thought it would be? Buyer’s remorse on a plate of gator sliders is a lot different from buyer’s remorse on a career. A spouse. A family.

She chose differently than I did. Though we are the same age, my friend has chosen a husband, kids and a very different career than mine. I chose a career, a cat and a life where I come home to a house of near silence. Though neither of us wishes to swap lives, there are certainly days when we would both like to swap for a couple of hours. After those two hours, I would say “I just need some quiet,” and she would say “I’m bored and miss my family,” but the impulse is still there.

I look at her life and think “look at these people on her team, look at the life they can make together. She does not have to go on awkward first dates and her house is not like a library. She and her husband can lean on each other, and her kids need her.” I’m sure there’s some little part of her that looks at my life and thinks “she can talk on the phone without anyone yelling ‘mommy!’ She can go out dancing, nobody asks her what’s for dinner after she’s worked a long day, and nobody ever pukes on her.”

Universal truth: it is nice to not be puked on.

The thing about choosing a life is that it really is possible to change your mind. You can choose the career for a while, and then choose the family. You don’t always have to choose correctly the first time (though I don’t recommend un-choosing your children), but everything you do is a kind of choice.

Indecision is still a decision, it’s just really lazy. It is you saying, “I choose to not eat.” I would rather make a decision and then change my mind than just not care, and lord knows I’ve changed my mind a few times. Go on, ask me about my college credits.

I have friends who are thinking of changing their direction. I have friends who love their direction. I have friends who forgot to choose. Though my friend and I may think for a minute or two that the grass is greener on the other side, we are both ultimately content with what we’ve chosen. One day I may choose something else, but that doesn’t mean that what I have is somehow unacceptable. It’s like choosing between shrimp and gator: there’s no wrong choice, but there might be a better one.

In the great restaurant of life, you may regret having ordered gator sliders. You may sit and wonder if the shrimp might have been better. But if you don’t choose something, you definitely lose. You sit there and starve.

I ended up picking the grilled shrimp. They were delicious. But I’m getting the gator sliders next time.

The locker rooms at the Y are separated by gender, but they are also separated by age. Anyone under the age of 13 is supposed to be using the Family Locker Room. I had always assumed that this was so little kids weren’t running around annoying the single adults, but maybe it’s also to keep kids out of an area where said adults might be walking around naked. Mainly, this rule translates to one thing: the adult locker room is a strange world of forbidden fascination. I imagine this is why 3 little girls, all clad in blue karate gis, were running around me as I gathered up my bag, boots and cloak after an hour on the elliptical machine. Then they weren’t running. They were just standing there, staring at me. The brave one spoke up.

“You have TWO earrings in your ear,” marveled the freckled, curly-haired 8ish year old.

“Oh no,” I answered, pulling back my hair, “there are SIX.”

Awed gasps all around. In adult land, I’m the most white bread goth chick alive. To these kids, I was Fakir Musafar.

I am interrogated until these girls know exactly how long cartilage takes to heal, how to pierce an ear, how much it will hurt and to “not walk around with a safety pin in your ear because it’s not very classy.”

“When did you get your first one?”

“When I was four. The second one, I did a long time ago, when I was sixteen.”

“How old are you now?”

“Thirty-four.”

(This time, the awed gasps translate to “holy crap, that’s older than MOM, and she’s OLD.”)

“Wow…that WAS a long time ago. What about that? Did that hurt?” She motions toward my tattoo, a black bow just above my wrist.

“Yes, especially on the tender meat on the inside, but it only took an hour and a half.”

“Did it hurt a lot?”

“Have you ever been stung by a bee? It’s like that, but it takes so long that you just get used to it after a while. Then you go home and take a nap.”

“I could never have a bow on me. That’s going to be there until YOU DIE.”

“I wondered that, but after a week, I couldn’t imagine my arm without it.”

“You can get it removed with surgery.”

(She also asked if my earring holes would hear all the way. This little girl remaking me in the image of Martha Stewart with a tone of “it’s not too late for you.”)

“But I don’t want to have it removed. I want more of them. I want to do my whole arm, but I keep having to spend money on other things, things around the house.”

“What color is your house?”

“Gray, but next summer it’s going to change to light green.”

They pause. I could fairly see the gears turning in the brave one’s mind.

Tick…

tock…

tick…

“Amy?”

She has read my name from the ID tag on my gym bag and said my name with a certain brand of solid, deadpan, “let’s get serious” tone. I’m startled, momentarily thinking that this little girl has, in fact, been hired by my mother to remake me in the image of Martha Stewart.

“Are you married?”

“No.”

“Engaged??”

“No.”

“Do you have a boyfriend???”

Her tone gets more and more strained with each question, as though she’s begging me to throw her a bone. To make the world make sense. To explain how someone can be OLDER THAN MOM and still be single.

“We just broke up, actually.”

“How long were you together?”

“Almost a year.”

Again, her world is making no sense. A year is FOREVER.

“It’s fine, really. Sometimes people just can’t get things to work and you have to realize that maybe you should just be friends instead.”

This is me, putting on my happy, independent face. I’m single! I have freedom! Wheeeeeee! Everything will be wonderful and everybody will be friends and bluebirds will my onto my finger if I put my hand out the window in the morning. I most certainly was not drunk for two weeks, I didn’t do jigsaw puzzles and cry and I certainly haven’t been freebasing sappy Gavin DeGraw songs. No, sir. Everybody’s wonderful and there are frickin bluebirds and–

“But do you have a boyfriend NOW?”

(God, are we still on this? Look, I told you, HAPPY INDEPENDENT FACE.)

“No. It’s a little too soon. I’m just having fun doing my thing and hanging out with friends.” (Also, bluebirds!)

Her face is calling bullshit on me. I am being CALLED BULLSHIT ON by an 8 year old in a karate outfit. This, readers, is why I have a hard time taking myself seriously. I’m standing there, trying to explain the complexities of relationships and moving on to someone who (statistically) does not yet fully grasp abstract nouns. Also, I am sweaty and would like a shower.

I excuse myself and leave the three confused girls standing there in the locker room. I’m still not sure who the Y is trying to protect with that “adults only” locker room rule.

After that, the death buzz from my Hello Kitty alarm clock slices through the whole damn thing.

Still, I have secretly allowed myself to maintain the delusion that I am dating Gavin DeGraw. After all, who could it hurt? No one.

No one but Adam Levine, that is.

My fantasy world is elaborate and detailed and, in said fantasy world, I have to come to a decision. DeGraw or Levine? On the one hand, DeGraw can be a bit doofy-looking and smokes pot. On the other hand, Levine is rumored to be a bit of a douche and likes deep V-necks a little more than a straight man ought to. Clearly, the only thing to do is make a bar graph.

1.Appearances in dreams: advantage DeGraw

2. Maroon 5 logo looks like it was designed by Klaus Nomi. Advantage: Levine

3. DeGraw smokes pot. Advantage Levine.

4. DeGraw is on record using the phrase “Do you know who I am?” non-sarcastically. Advantage: Levine.

5. Whispering into a microphone: advantage: Levine.

6. Dudes playing piano are hot. Advantage: DeGraw.

7. Both give unsettling quantities of eye contact. Advantage: none.

8. Twitter sarcasm: DeGraw’s twitter uses “u” for “you.” Levine’s is clever. Advantage: Levine.

9. Sense of humor: DeGraw seems eternally earnest, yet Levine is quite the snarky bastard. (It’s a fine line between douchebag and delightful snark pirate. For my dollar, I vote “snark pirate.”)

10.Video sexiness: advantage Levine.

11. Fashion: DeGraw just got out of bed. Levine wears deep V-necks. Advantage: none. (However, Levin in a suit sweeps the category)

12. Hair: Levine’s hair seems bulletproof, but DeGraw always wears hats and is thus suspected of baldness. Advantage: Levine.

13. Tattoos: advantage: Levine.

14. Workout habits: Advantage Levine

15. Lady hips: advantage: Levine.

16. Southern Accent for no good reason: advantage DeGraw

17. Twitter humor: advantage: Levine Exhibit A and Exhibit B

18. Interview mannerisms: DeGraw seems kind of nervous and fidgety, like someone who is endearing REALLY uncomfortable being interviewed. Levine is better rehearsed (upon telling Chelsea Handler that he’s dating a model, he says “go ahead, roll your eyes” and mentions that “it’s possible to be cool AND like Maroon 5…I think.”)

19. Love of Prince: advantage Levine.

20. Artsy pretentiousness (or lack thereof): advantage Levine. When interviewed, DeGraw says things like “I wanted to get back to basics, to get out of the way of the songs,” which is valid and true (and worked really well on Free), but I can’t help but prefer Levine, who summed up his latest work with, “we were like, fuck it, let’s have fun and make a sexy, confident record.” (They did. Hands All Over is awesome, y’all.)

So, which wins? The lovable awkward piano playing-ness of DeGraw, or the fuck-you snark-swagger of Levine? So help me, I’m gonna go with the swagger. Whip-smart humor is sexy. Not taking yourself too seriously is sexy. In the words of Levine, “confidence is sexy.”

Now I just have to break it to DeGraw next time he shows up in a dream.

I was more than happy to tell the guy at the bank about how well my mom’s stuffing went over. We all miss grandma, but (all due respect) alzheimer’s will seriously screw up your cooking skills. I also abided the rules of courtesy and left out the part about how I came home, drank a 40 and cried out a recent breakup. These things happen.

I ran into “when in doubt, ask questions” while signing up at the local YMCA.

“So, what do you do?”
(Web design, moving into development.)

“Oh, so you type fast?”
(Yes, but mainly cause I typed a lot of letters in high school and play the piano.)

“Piano? Do you also sing?”
(Not in public.)

With that, I paid my money and had done something I’d wanted to do for a long time but had never had time or money. I joined the local Y. So, how’s it going?

The Y is the land of happy, skinny people. All of the women are toned, all of the guys are good-looking, and everybody’s rosy-cheeked and nice. I suspect that the Y is a lot like Sweden. I would feel terribly awkward and out of place, except that all of the employees are super nice and the other patrons seem to be too involved in whatever they’re doing to notice what I giant n00b I am.

You’d think by now that I would know that the locker room is pretty much ALWAYS right next to the pool. You’d think the Y would give new people some kind of tour or a map. You’d be wrong on all counts. However, once I just ASKED somebody to point me toward the locker room, I found the one at the Margaret Maddox Y (Inglewood) to be pretty nice. The one downtown is, hands down, the nicest locker room I have ever seen in my limited experience of locker rooms. In square footage, it might be bigger than my house, and the shower steam is kept separate, avoiding having the whole room turn into a nasty sauna.

Learn from my mistakes: if you just START USING the machine, whether it be elliptical, bike, or whatever, the thing will turn on and instruct you. Please do not ask me how I learned this. Please also do not tell any tv producers that they should follow me around with a tv camera for a show called “Adventures of Smart Girls with No Common Sense.”

If the class says “Advanced Step Aerobics,” this is not a descriptor of how much cardio will be done. This is a descriptor of how familiar you will need to be with WHAT THE HELL has happened to step aerobics since I took it in college. Those women were doing a full-out improv dance routine, apparently based solely on whatever the instructor was yelling. It was like really fast square dancing. I was positioned behind two leggy amazons from Planet Pilates who would literally do ballet jumps while the rest of us were marching in place. This leaves me with the following conclusion:

Assuming I did not unknowingly drop acid before class, I should hit a beginner class until I know what the hell “bus stop,” “rhumba left,” and “revolving door” are.

I also went to a sculpting class and learned that I am a total wuss. Judging from the feel of my arms 6 hours after class, I may not be able to move my arms tomorrow. Just FYI in case you need any air traffic control or baseball umpiring.

All in all, it’s been a really good experience so far. After a month of not being able to work out because of school and work, it feels really good and productive to be back at it, and to be doing something more interesting than walking the same 6 mile neighborhood loop that I always walk. Granted, this means I will no longer get cat calls from the NADC dorms, but you know: everything’s a trade off.

I’m being the crotch of my underwear.

My friend informs me that some magazine says that a lady ought to replace her underwear every three years. I’m willing to bet that said magazine was Cosmo. Then again, Cosmo also recently claimed that a good way to spice up one’s sex life was to wear one’s thong as a scrunchie.

PS: That’s sort of gross.
PPS: WHY ARE YOU WEARING A SCRUNCHIE?

Things like that make me picture some poor writer, fresh out of Yale, getting her first job in writing. Her editor, who looks like Devil Wears Prada Meryl Streep, plops down a stack of back issues, has her read all of the “____ ways to spice up your sex life” articles, and then demands she think of something new.

She feels her face flush with anger at the injustice of the job market and then sarcastically suggests thong scrunchies. She expects to be fired for her insolence. Instead, she is promoted.

Anyway. The underwear.

Guys get a bad rap for wearing their underwear until it falls apart, but I’m here to tell you that women are just as bad. The underwear life cycle goes a little something like this:

1. “Whee! Look at my sexy new underwear! Hey, boyfriend, check out my butt!”

2. “The elastic’s starting to give up on life. I guess these should go into the ‘period drawers’ category.”

3. “Oh, who am I kidding? These don’t even have enough life to properly position feminine hygiene products.”

4. “Fine. But only when I’m sure no one will see.”

Then, one day, you hit step 5. You go to pee and realize that you can see the floor through a tiny hole in the front. The cotton crotch is in bits, dangling separately from the satiny part. There are only two choices at this stage:

1. Throw the underwear away
2. Wear the underwear as a scrunchie

I assume you know what to do. Unless you work at Cosmo.

“Going to BarCamp.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s basically a day of douchebaggery and business card distribution, thinly disguised as a day of informative seminars.”

As you may have guessed, I was less than enthused about the idea of spending my Saturday attempting to mingle with people I’d never met. Three years of working from home has made me weird(er), and I wasn’t much of a mingler in the first place. Thus, the idea of being thrown into a room of total strangers and expected to mingle is right up there with “mow the lawn” and “go to baby shower” on the list of things I would rather not do.

I went because I have finally realized that working by yourself at home is perhaps not the best way to stay on top of what people are talking about. Yes, there’s twitter. There are blogs. But neither of those involve BEER, so I went to BarCamp. If nothing else, I would suck it up and perhaps learn how to mingle. Or at least watch successful minglers (aka “marketing people”) in their natural habitat. As I often do, I psyched myself up in order to develop a positive attitude:

“It’ll be like Big Cat Diary. In your head, you can narrate in a British accent. If all else fails, you can do what all other socially awkward people do: you can mess around with your phone and pretend it’s the most interesting thing ever.”

I ended up being pleasantly surprised. While not all of the panels I went to ended up being super exciting, I did actually end up meeting some cool people. I had some very pleasant and non-fake feeling conversations. Yes, I gave out my business card to a few people, but all but one of those people asked for said card. I tend to get into a conversation and completely forget to even OFFER the card, being too distracted by whatever’s being said and the general sensory overload of being in a room full of people.

I ran into a couple of people I know from the coffee shop, one guy I dated for a while and a couple of people I know from Twitter. The surprisingly pleasant day was topped off at the after party, held in a karaoke bar. When one fellow got on stage to sing “Purple Rain,” the initial crowd response was, “hey, he’s actually pretty good.” By the time the guy on stage was hitting the super-high notes at the end, the reaction had grown into “stunned, awed silence.”

“That’s the guy who played guitar for Prince in the 80s!”

“That’s Dez Dickerson?!”

(Of COURSE I knew the guy’s name. Are you new here?)

After he was done singing, I went over and showed him the pictures inside the locket I always wear. Purple Rain-era Prince on the right, Morris Day on the left.

I survived mingling, and I’m glad I didn’t peace out early. I believe this BarCamp thing will have to happen again.

I pay for 10 channels. “Ghetto cable” for which you have to specifically ask if you wish to receive. However, I now have full basic cable, thanks to corporate laziness and underpayment of Comcast’s tech staff. When the “ghetto cable” filter/blocker breaks, techs usually just remove it rather than go to the trouble and expense of replacing it.

So, I have full basic cable, but my box is a piece of crap that I dare not attempt to replace. Besides, I don’t have time for much TV, so I don’t care. Until 11pm, when I need something to fall asleep to.

It was a dark and stormy night. I couldn’t even get USA or E!. Times were hard, people. I got desperate. I went…over 100. The channels over 100. The wasteland of sports, Jesus and telenovella.

A choir of angels. A ray of moonlight. Perfect reception on the Hallmark channel, and…a Golden Girls marathon.

I have spent the last week reliving my days in the Belmont dorm, when Lifetime had Golden Girls and Designing Women on an endless loop. Reliving such stories as “Rose thinks she kills men because they keep having heart attacks during sex,” “Blanche hits menopause,” and “Sophia becomes a nun.”

The scary part now is that these women who seemed so old when I was a kid are now younger than my mom. I can’t stop wondering if Dorothy’s clothes were all from the same store, or if some misguided costumer MADE all of them. I mean, we’re talking about huge quantities of cowl necks and drapey shirts. The sheer volume of the stuff suggests that it had to have been handmade, possibly by one clothing label, possibly one named House of Zbornak. (Frankly, I’m surprised that no one has written a blog solely on this topic, replete with screen shots. I looked.)

And the shoulder pads! And who actually uses the word “lanai”? And why was there never a “very special” Golden Girls where one of the characters gets diabetes from too many 3am cheesecake eating sessions? Dorothy could have a massive coronary and keel over into a pot of Sophia’s 14-hour sauce.

And the wicker furniture.
The horror.

I leave you with some choice images and a couple of links.

Pals and Confidants Meme blog on Tumblr

Side note: I remember when widgets where placeholder words for things one would manufacture if one had a business. “Say you’re making, uh, widgets…” the professor would say. Now that widgets are actual things, I wonder what word business schools use as a placeholder. Smorglflat? And whether WordPress sidebars will soon utilize smorglflat technology. Also, Smorglflat sounds like the name of a black metal band comprised of Muppets.

Anyway, the to-do list. I look at the clock and say, “I have _____ hours. Let’s see how far I can get on this list.”

That’s a fine way to go about things if all you need to do is get things done. If you care about not losing your mind, I’m not sure I’d recommend it.

Trouble is, when you go and go each day until you can’t go anymore, all you’re really doing is working and sleeping. One day, your cat knocks over a glass of Kool Aid and you just lose your shit, that being the final straw in a giant hay bale of frustration and loneliness. As you’re kneeling on a towel in your bedroom, soaking up the last of the seltzer water you used to clean up the spill, you just lean your head on the edge of the bed and cry because you’d think that, for ONE THING on Earth, your cat would let you god damn sleep past 5am.

(continued tomorrow)