The Creative Nest

 Do you have one coworker you just cannot deal with? In meetings? In the chat sidebar? Or in the general sense of having to be alive in the same building as them for eight hours? Mine has to be right. That's the whole personality. He isn't loud — not a shouter, nothing dramatic. He's a calm man in a shirt that is always one shade of blue off from all his other shirts, and he has never once been wrong about anything. Here's how the chatting goes. 9:04 a.m.: "Can you handle the thing with the list before the sync?" No list. No sync on the calendar. I ask which list, and he writes, "the one we discussed." We didn't discuss it. We discussed his parking spot for eleven minutes. I ask again. He replies, "I'll let you run with it," which is a sentence that means I am now going to do something wrong in public, and he will be watching from a comfortable distance. So I do the task badly, obviously, because there was no task. And he comes b...

My coworker told me the other day she has over twenty tattoos and my face did a thing I didn't authorize. Just a full system reboot, right there in the break room, next to a microwave that smells like last Thursday's soup. Twenty. That's not a decision anymore. That's a subscription. She showed me a few. A little one on her wrist — a wave, or possibly a slug, hard to tell under the fluorescent lights. Something small on her ankle. She's thirty and the ink looks great on her, honestly. Crisp black lines sitting exactly where they're supposed to sit. And instead of my brain saying "nice," it started doing arithmetic. What happens to twenty tattoos at seventy? Because skin does not stay the way it leaves the factory. It sags and it spots, and it bruises if you look at it funny. I've been looking at my own arms funny for a decade. So picture me at seventy-eight with twenty-plus tattoos. The dolphin on my hip — a majestic creature in 2011 — has spre...

Quick question, and I need you to actually sit with it even though you're probably holding a sandwich: when you picture yourself at eighty-something, what's there? Don't be shy. Nobody's grading this. I'll go first, since I clearly have no dignity left to protect. When I picture myself at eighty, I see a woman with strong opinions about a checkout clerk's hair. Not loud opinions. Worse — quiet ones, saved up and delivered later to whoever's stuck in the passenger seat. Did you see that girl's bangs. They were doing two different things. Here's the thing I keep chewing on. I assume I'll mellow. That somewhere around seventy-two a draft will get through a window and blow the hard edges off me. But I've met older women who did not mellow, and honestly they seemed fine with it. There's a woman at my grocery store who wears a visor indoors and critiques the melons out loud. She isn't cruel. She's just... unmonitored. I think that...