The Creative Nest

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...

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...