The Creative Nest

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 ...

 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...