The Creative Nest

Twenty years at the same company. Two decades of the same parking lot and the same break room microwave that still smells like someone's 2014 leftovers. Next year the loyalty pays out in the only currency that matters to me now: five weeks of vacation. Five. Weeks. I did the math on the back of a receipt, which is the only kind of math I trust. One week per quarter gets me to twenty days. That leaves five days floating loose in the year, like a sock in the dryer or a lizard in the kitchen. Those five days are mine to spend badly and I plan to spend them badly. Here is the thing about vacation time at my company. It accrues. It sits there in the HR portal like a very polite hostage, ticking up in fractions of an hour while I sit in a meeting about a meeting. There is a cap. There is always a cap. Someone in Benefits decided years ago that we should not be allowed to hoard our days like a dragon with a coin pile, and honestly, fair. But every December I get an email warning me abo...

The first date went fine right up until the part where he said it. We were talking about the bridge traffic, or his brother's boat, I don't remember which, and he leaned back in the booth and said, cheerful, that he hoped I wasn't the type who believed in horoscopes. I laughed. What else do you do. Then he told me about a girlfriend he had who read the newspaper one, the printed horoscope column, in the actual paper, like it was 1994. Fine. I knew his sign before I knew his last name. I want that on the record. I did the thing where you type a birth date into your phone right there at the table with your coat still on, next to a basket of breadsticks you are not going to eat. The app sent me a notification. Saturn, opposition, something. A little ring of planets spun on my screen while he was telling me about the boat, it was extremely unhelpful, and I watched all of it with my glass of water in my hand. Here is the thing about horoscopes. Nobody believes in them and e...

Something I've discovered, mostly by doing things wrong, is that almost nothing you want to do can actually be the thing you do first. Take tonight. Tonight I want to make pasta. Simple. Pasta. But the pot is in the dishwasher, and the dishwasher is full of clean dishes, and the clean dishes can't come out because the drying rack is full of other clean dishes from yesterday, and those can't move because the counter they'd go on is covered in mail and a bread maker I haven't used since 2021. So to make pasta I first have to empty a drying rack, which means putting away dishes, which means clearing the counter, which means dealing with the mail, which means finding a pen, which means locating the pen behind the couch with the approximately nine hundred other pens that have rolled back there since the dawn of time. By the time I find the pen I no longer want pasta. But I've started, and this is the trap. It's worse with cleaning, because cleaning has rules t...