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  • Aging is for the weak, and everyone else
  • More short cuts
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  • What’s the opposite of green juice and deep breathing
  • Living through it all online
  • The Change
  • 18
  • Ok but ALSO:
  • Midlife POV
  • Influence and Dooce
  • Horse therapy
  • You can’t go home again
  • Obsolescence
  • Before and after
  • A cringe confession on friendship

Archives from 2002-2006

Many years ago, I had a minimum-wage job working for a movie theater. It was a pretty fun job, as those types of things go, but god forbid you ever needed to miss a day of work. We got paid shit, we were treated like shit, but the way the management reacted if you called in sick made it seem like our jobs were as mission-critical as rocket scientists who were also firefighters on their way to a burning orphanage while carrying human organs packed in ice.

That’s sort of how I feel these days. Being at home all day often makes me feel like the most useless waste of food on the planet — my contributions to the world are nearly nil, and everything I do is cyclical. Everything has to be repeated over and over and over and over: nothing stays clean, article deadlines never stop coming, the laundry just keep re-generating itself like the blobby metal dude in Terminator 2.

And yet it’s goddamned near impossible for me to leave. I received an offer to travel out of town for a couple days — just a fun-sounding blogger event, something that sounded both interesting and like a nice break from business as usual — and the logistics involved in trying to make this happen have been nearly insurmountable. Who would pick Riley up from the bus stop? Who would take Dylan to preschool? Who would watch Dylan on his non-preschool day? The daily tasks that seem both mind-numbing and hugely unappreciated literally REQUIRE MY PRESENCE. If I’m not here, it’s a clusterfuck of epic proportions, trying to call in favors and beg for family help and work around schedules and feeling enormously guilty and like a massive pain in everyone’s ass.

Since my job is so very important, apparently, why then don’t I feel more of a sense of accomplishment each day? Or, say, ANY SENSE OF ACCOMPLISHMENT AT ALL.

For a brief period of time I was posting cat pictures on a Tumblr. I can’t keep that shit up, but the embarrassing truth remains: at least 67% of my phone’s photo library is filled with CAT.

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