Oct
10
Working from not-home
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I have a babysitter who comes to the house three days a week, usually from 11-2 PM. This is by far my most productive work time, because—and here’s something I didn’t 100% totally completely grok with fullness a year ago—working from home with kids around is, like, really hard.
It makes a pretty big difference in my week to be able to get out now and then in order to grind out some deadlines, but there is, of course, the small matter of finding some place to go.
For a while I went to a coffee shop, but I gave that up because 1) the wireless was always slow or spotty, 2) I felt like a dick buying one coffee and taking up a chair for three hours, and 3) it was infusing me with roasted bean stench. My hair, my laptop bag, my clothes—it was worse than being in a smoky bar, I swear to god.
I’ve tried the large food court area of a local mall, where you can find one of a zillion tables and pick up the nearby library’s wireless, but this got depressing real fast. It’s, you know, a food court. It’s loud and messy and the chairs suck and it’s just kind of bleak.
So for the last several months, I’ve been going to the library. It’s perfect in most ways—it’s quiet, the wireless is great, the couches are comfy. The only problem is that it’s full of people being as silent and self-contained as possible. No one is talking or interacting with each other, except for harried mothers chasing toddlers through the kids’ section. This is a great environment for focusing on work, but for someone who is already so isolated from other adults, it’s, I don’t know, it’s like being there every week is contributing to this growing sensation that I am disconnected from everything. There I sit with my laptop, ostensibly around other people, but sealed into my own muted world.
It’s lonely.
(I’m not sure if I’m describing this well.)
Have any of you tackled the issue of working without an office? Did you find a good solution for those times when it’s better to work outside the home? Did anything help stave off the feeling that you were, ha ha, slowly morphing into freakish recluse doomed to eventually develop an obsession for urinating in jars and putting Kleenex boxes on your feet?
Oct
7
TRY TO STAY ALERT
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Last night while I was lying in bed and the cat was going absolutely crazy all over the damn house with what I have come to call The Cat 11 PM Flimflams (as in, “Goddammit, Cat has the Flimflams again . . . oh right, look what time it is.”), I started googling things like So Are Cats Nocturnal Or Like What’s Going On Here, and How Can I Encourage My Cat to Calm the Fuck Down At Night Before I Kill Her By Driving a Pencil Into Her Tiny Helpless Brain-Meat.
It turns out there is lots of advice on this topic, the main point being that you should try and swap your cat’s natural schedule by keeping her active during the day. I was sort of eye-rolling over the idea of adding “Entertain Cat” to my daily list of to-dos, but then I got to this one simple phrase on a web page titled “How to Stop the Night Time Crazies”:
Discourage catnapping.
Okay, I can’t really explain it, but I started laughing at that and could not stop. Discourage catnapping. Oh my god.
So I was already in a semi-hysterical state when I came across this advice under the paragraph heading “Sneak Attacks”:
If he is meowing outside the bedroom door, first reach for the water sprayer
Heh. Ha. First reach for the water sprayer.
… quietly get out of bed and creep towards the door …
Haaaaaa. CREEP TOWARDS THE DOOR.
then suddenly fling the door open, squirt the cat and then immediately shut the door
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH SUDDENLY SQUIRT THE CAT. IMMEDIATELY SHUT THE DOOR.
At this point I was laughing so hard I couldn’t breathe, and I had tears running down both sides of my face. I was trying to read this out loud to JB, who kept looking at me with great annoyance and saying, “I don’t get it. This isn’t even remotely funny.”
Try to stay alert for five minutes …
HAAAA TRY TO STAY ALERT. HAAA. FIVE MINUTES. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAA!
By the time I got to the final sentence I could barely choke it out (JB: *giant impatient sigh*) and then I had to rush to the bathroom because I was thisclose to peeing my pants.
waiting by the door with the water sprayer ready in case of a second attack.
I don’t even know, you guys. As I type this, I’m laughing all over again. IN CASE OF A SECOND ATTACK. Oh god why is that so funny WHYYYY.
Anyway, I have no real point in sharing this, except 1) I love the Internet, and 2) holy crap I hate the Cat Flimflams.
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