The Creative Nest

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...

The question isn't "do I need a new coffee pot." The question is: how long can a person look at the same coffee pot before their brain snaps in the kitchen at 6:03 a.m. Mine was a Black & Decker that had been here since before I could prove it. The plastic on the handle had gone from black to a sort of nicotine-yellow, and one of the feet had worn down so badly that the whole thing tilted slightly to the left, like it was perpetually exhausted with me. The "on" light hadn't worked in years. You just learned to listen for the gurgle. If it gurgled, it was on. If it wasn't gurgling, you had forgotten to plug it in again. This was a perfectly workable system. And yet, for the last eight months, every morning I would stand there, bleary, pouring water into its crusty reservoir and think: I could upgrade this. I should have known I was in trouble the day I googled "best drip coffee maker" on my phone while still in bed. I was not looking for a ...