So I was in the shower this morning, wondering why the water wasn’t really hot. I mean, it was warm enough, I guess, but I had the cold tap off and the hot tap on, and still my shower was not “HOT”, per se.

I didn’t want to go to work this morning, nor do I ever, particularly, want to go to work. I love my weekends and my free time, my time with Katsu and my time alone, and work just seems like this THING that gets in the way of whatever else I might do with those nine hours each day if I could have them back. Sometimes I think about work, and the fact that I’ll have to be working for about the next 50 years, and it makes me want to sink to my knees and slip down the drain with the water and the soap. It just seems like too MUCH, you know? And then, after work is done, there’s all the non-work work, like dishes and laundry, and the fact that I’ll have to do dishes and laundry until my arms and legs give out. There’s no retirement from housework, although the current condition of the apartment might suggest that I’ve come to a contrary conclusion. Occasionally, even the thought of all the COMPLETELY non-work events is enough to make me throw in the towel – if you look around and think about all the hangovers to be endured and all the mornings to wake up feeling fine, all the small talk conversations, children and aging parents. This long string of decisions and chores.

The shittiest thing I’ve had to do lately was that drive back from Jersey in the rain, for sure, and even though I wanted to cry and give up, I kept plowing through the downpour right along with everybody else. I knew that I could have stopped or pulled over to wait out the storm, but who knows how long that would have taken, and I was eager to get back to Boston, to my bottle of Malbec and my pajamas. And at some point I realized that nobody WANTED to be driving in that weather, but we were all intent on our goal of comfort and home. Sort of, we were in it together, even though we were all in separate cars.

That kind of changed my stance on the shit of life, somehow. Like this morning, with my unfulfilling shower and the promise of nine hours of subsistence labor ahead of me, instead of getting pissed off and depressed, I thought about everybody else who must also be having Monday morning water troubles, and maybe somewhere out there was another girl who decided to forego washing her hair because it just seemed like too much work. And somehow, that made me feel better.