Except that picture is inaccurate, because you can’t see any of the other employees. Ah, here we go:

That’s Nito. He works here too. He is a cat.

Some people think that working with a cat is all kneady paws and rumbly purrs. But to be honest with you, we have had our share of personnel issues around here.

First of all, I’m lucky if I can get him to come into work at all. He frequently calls in sick, as if we do not live in our office and I can’t see him over there, enjoying a relaxing afternoon nap and sporting what appears to be a suspiciously fresh pedicure.

Even if I do manage to get him to show up for work, he is usually so bored that he can’t even feign interest in the project at hand.

But then the next minute, he has hurt feelings because he feels left out of the creative process. Meanwhile, I’m all, “Dude, we HAD a meeting about this. We took a VOTE. You ABSTAINED.”

Cats. What can you do.

Worse, his management style can be decidedly … authoritarian. I mean, I’m working as fast as I can, dude. Back off.

Of course, true to form, you’ll catch him sleeping on the job not five minutes later.

Hypocrite.

Even when he’s awake, it’s pretty obvious that he isn’t listening to a word I say.

Nito? Did you get a chance to come up with any feedback on that proposal I put in your inbox? Nito?

Even when he is willing to contribute, he spends a suspicious amount of time “meditating for inspiration.”

Mmm. hmmm.

But honestly, I don’t mind, even if every time he crawls into my lap purring about us “collaborating on this manuscript,” I wind up doing most of the work.

I’m not sure why I put up with it, exactly. I think it’s probably because he just happens to be cute enough to do wonders for office morale.

Plus … just between you and me … in my opinion, his salary amounts to mere kibble. Sucker.

I’m lucky I have a passion for eating, or I would have starved to death pretty much as soon as feeding me became my responsibility. I can see the tombstone engraving now:

The kitchen was all the way over there, and I just couldn’t be bothered.

–Jen the Trephinist, 1980-1998

When I am not passionate (see: statistics class), I can barely stay awake. I learn nothing. I am bored and stupid and whiny and I dislike myself almost as much as the people trying to teach me poker or football or knitting are learning to dislike me. I shift in my seat, I sigh, I prop my chin up on my hand. When told to roll a pair of dice and add up the dots, I moan theatrically and lay my head down on the table, because counting dots is soooo hard and soooo pointless and oh my God who even caaaaaaares. Needless to say, you probably shouldn’t invite me to Game Night.

When I was in school, ADD diagnoses had not yet become all the rage, so instead I was just lazy—bright, yes, and capable, yes, but going nowhere. I mean, despite the fact that I had already completed the unabridged Les Miserables of my own volition in SIXTH GRADE, turning the pages in morbid fascination as I realized that people used to like sell their own front teeth and build their own barricades in the streets and shit, I got a D in English my freshman year of high school because I couldn’t be bothered to compose Captain Obvious essays about the oh-so-implicit themes in Lord of the Flies. I mean, we all get what that book’s about, right? Right? Must we be so tiresome as to insult one another’s intelligence by beating the topic into the ground?

Unfortunately, my English teacher took exception to my logic, and my parents REALLY REALLY took exception to my logic, which is how I found myself spending the next three years flipping through My Antonia and groaning over the computer keyboard while my parents jingled the car keys over my head. (Turns out I had a passion for being able to go places by myself.)

Despite my parents’ shrewd ministrations, I still got a D in PE class my senior year, even though I weighed under a hundred pounds and could run a mile in less than six minutes. This happened because I found real bowling to be unappealingly intricate, and thus insisted on perfecting the Granny Throw instead, which was less effective but far more amusing. Luckily, at that point, my parents were just happy I had somehow managed to graduate with a B average and get into a decent college, so the incident passed by without comment.

That lazy label, though. It stuck with me for years, because when my teachers said it, I believed them. And when anyone I was in a relationship with said it, I believed them too. I believed them because somehow, it had escaped my notice that when I am passionate, I can learn. I can concentrate. I can focus with a singularity of purpose typically found only in moths plink-plink-plinking against lightbulbs, longing for the filament that eludes them even as they bask in it.

Except I am not a moth. I am a human, right down to my cerebrum and my opposable thumbs, and that means that I am going to GET that motherfucking filament and I am going to make it my bitch.

For instance, as a small child, I decided that my fondest wish was to dig a hole to China, where everyone wore funny clothes and walked upside down. My mother, never one to discourage me but also somewhat familiar with my Moth Mode and therefore concerned that I would dig a hole deep enough to hit a buried cable and electrocute myself or God knows what (and also admittedly somewhat worried that her backyard would not look as nice once I had graced it with an impromptu mine shaft), told me that I was absolutely welcome to dig my hole to China—as long as I did it with a fruit spoon.

That’s right: she handed me a FRUIT SPOON, with helpfully corrugated tip, and graciously wished me the best of luck in my efforts to reach Peking.

Naturally, I did what any rational person would do, and snatched it out of her hand like FINE, BITCH, and marched myself right out into the yard to show that woman who’s boss. And then I dug for hours with that goddamned fruit spoon, crouching all day in the blazing midsummer heat until there were blisters on my hands and she finally just took it away again, like, “Okay, psycho, if you aren’t going to take the hint and give up, then I’m going to pretend I suddenly really need this fruit spoon for something else, like this awesome fruit cocktail we’re going to eat out of this can, because it’s the 1980s and that’s just how we roll.”

Yeah. I was totally lazy. This trait was so clearly demonstrated throughout my childhood, like when I designed and tested several homemade parachutes (active ingredients: twine, garbage bags) by jumping repeatedly off the low end of the roof of our house until I almost broke my ankle and my mother once again found some creative way to suggest that perhaps this particular project had run its course.

More recently, this past Christmas, I thought it might be a fun idea to make a coffee-table book for my boyfriend, depicting the various online interactions involved in my stalking of him. Sure, I could assemble the pages in Photoshop and then have the book printed … OR I could lend it a whimsical quality by printing out all the photographs and Google chats, then assemble each page on a black refrigerator using alphabet letters and thematic retro magnets that I had purchased for the occasion after combing through the magnet selections of no fewer than three separate gift stores, and THEN set up a tripod and photograph the front of the refrigerator thirty SEPARATE TIMES after I had composed each page, and THEN tweak all of it in Photoshop before assembling it into a Shutterfly book.

Of course, when I reviewed the photos, the clarity was not to my liking. No problem! I simply dropped digital versions of the photos on top of the photographed versions (carefully drawing feathered selections AROUND the magnets sitting on TOP of the photographed photos, of course, to preserve them), then scanned the face of each magnet on my parents’ scanner in order to repeat that process with each magnet.

Also, I suppose it’s worth noting that I had taped off a 12×12 square on the fridge first, because the coffee-table book was 12×12 and it was important to me that everything be life-size, as it would be on a refrigerator. Plus, you know, it’s important to make sure the photographed type doesn’t come out too small in the final product. Ahem.

And then I got worried about page spreads not corresponding nicely with one another, so I also had the presence of mind to make a spacer page in order to ensure that I could have the spreads I wanted:

Yeah. Hi. Did I mention that I did all of this in two days?

Oh man. Sooooo lazy.

I have told you all of this to explain why, with only about a week’s notice, I’m moving back to the small hometown I swore I never wanted to live in again. Based only on three fuzzy cell-phone pictures, I rented an apartment over the phone while pacing the floor in Los Angeles, and I just saw it for the first time yesterday. I completely adore it … which is good news, seeing as I will be living in it NINE DAYS FROM NOW, HA HA HA HA.

“But you were talking about moving to Portland,” you’re saying. “But you said you wanted to live somewhere that is vegan-friendly with public transportation!”

Oh, I know. I know, because I’ve had this conversation thousands of times throughout my life. It usually goes like this:

Me: I’m moving back to my hometown!
Other Person: What? I thought you were moving to New Zealand.
Me: Oh, that. No. New plan.
Other Person: But … you had so thoroughly researched the neighborhoods of Wellington.
Me: I know, I know. But that was before I knew about this other thing!
Other Person: You drew a comparison chart outlining the pros and cons of Wellington vs. Auckland.
Me: Oh. You remember that.
Other Person: You were going to have a llama.
Me: Well, there’s no sense dwelling on the past now that—
Other Person: The llama’s name was going to be Daisy, you said. Daisy the llama.
Me: Don’t be difficult.

What can I say? Moth Mode trumps all. (Also, this gig is relatively short term, so I’m still visiting Portland in May and could very well live there by the end of the year, if I like what I see.)

So … why? Why would I move somewhere that lacks a Trader Joe’s, has a tiny childfree population, and thinks that fish tacos are totally vegetarian?

Well, I’ve got two words for you: roller derby.

“But wait,” you say. “How can a town that doesn’t even have a Trader Joe’s have ROLLER DERBY?”

And the answer to your question is, “It doesn’t.”

But it will, if I have anything to say about it.

We had our first practice on Tuesday night. I doubt that any of my old teachers would have guessed that their lazy former student would be willing to embark on a twenty-hour blitz across three time zones just to be there. I slept in the Los Angeles airport on Monday night just to make sure I wouldn’t miss my 6 a.m. flight, then flew through Denver to Chicago, where I spent my three-hour layover typing up notes, then flew to my hometown with just enough time left to run into my parents’ house, print up my notes, stick them on a clipboard, grab my skate bag, and run out the door. After leading practice, I drove home, added my instructional notes to our Facebook discussion board, then climbed into a bed for the first time in more than thirty-six hours and curled up with the cat to snag some sleep before I had to roll back out of bed the next morning to pick up the keys to my new apartment (and oh, also, lay eyes on it for the first time).

I have two more practices to run before I drive back to St. Louis to walk into the home I will by then have left spontaneously abandoned for over three weeks, so that I can spend the subsequent week packing for the caravan that’s showing up to retrieve me on the thirteenth. I can start packing just as soon as I’m done running my last recreational derby game in St. Louis (in a recreational division of the league that I started in order to provide beginners and derby retirees with somewhere to play).

Before I do any of that, of course, I have a giant editorial deadline to make on Monday, a new apartment to clean, and a track to build. I’m sure my former math teachers would be surprised to know that I just willingly spent my time memorizing the dimensions of a standard Women’s Flat Track Derby Association track. A derby track, if you were wondering, is 88 feet long, with the curves radiating from points each 17.5 feet from the 44-foot center mark, swinging in inner and outer arcs that are 12.5 feet and 26.5 feet from those points, respectively, though you do offset each of the outer arcs a foot to the left of the center line (if you are standing at the center line and orienting yourself toward the curve each time).

In other words: PLINK-PLINK-PLINK, BITCHES.

And to think I never even managed to learn to apply the FOIL method properly, despite hours of tutoring. I’m not sure why. I’m guessing it’s because I was lazy.

Because sometimes, you will split up with your husband and get the cat you always wanted but couldn’t have, because he’s severely allergic. And then, when he comes to see your rabbit (NOT A EUPHEMISM OF ANY KIND), he will hang out with the cat anyway. Wearing a mask.

Not only will Nito take any pettings he can get, but Hugh was happy to see him.

Oh, the things in life that no one makes a Hallmark card for.

First, this post is not sponsored at all. I have accepted nothing from anyone and I am just spending my own money. I am not saying that because I expect you to be impressed, but because I’m worried you have become so jaded by the ongoing blight of Internet bribery that you won’t keep reading, and you guys, this is for the POOR PEOPLE so it makes me sad to think that you would miss out on a chance to help the POOR PEOPLE.

And it would be a shame for you to have misjudged me that way, because I am not THAT blogger at all, remember? I’m the tiresomely self-righteous blowhard blogger who takes things like ongoing blights of Internet bribery way too seriously, as if your blog and the New York Times are the exact same thing. Get it straight.

BUT ANYWAY. Let’s help some poor people!

Kiva is a site that allows you to alleviate poverty by making $25 loans to a small business owner in a process known as microlending. You might be helping a young woman start a small store in Ecuador or a group of seamstresses who sell aprons at the local market, but no matter what, one thing is undeniable: your money goes a long way. The odds are even good that you will get it back, at which point you can gloat over the fact that you managed to do a good deed for nothing and cash out or do it all over again.

Anyway, I was about to make a $50 set of loans when my checkout screen informed me that Kiva also does gift certificates. At which point I realized that it might be even more productive to let YOU make my loans for me. Then you get to feel good along with me (and along with some poor people too, I guess, but sometimes I forget about them when I’m busy reveling in my own selflessness), Kiva would get some publicity, and when you get your $50 back, you might be inspired to do the same thing on your blog, all at no additional cost to me.

And then there would be no more poor people ever and it would be traced back to this very post and I would finally manage to one-up Gandhi and win the Nobel Peace Prize. And then Gandhi would be all, well, it’s not like I was doing it for the prize anyway, but he would kind of mutter it while like sort of picking at the hem of his robe, and I would tell all my do-gooding friends about it later at the soup kitchen and we would roll our eyes like, hey Gandhi, jealous much?

So basically, the offer I’m making you right now is that if you leave a comment, you will be entered to win an immediate good deed and an eventual $50 in your pocket. Let me repeat the highlights of this amazing deal: you do practically nothing, you get money, and then you go to heaven, in that order, and all you have to do in exchange is endure your blistering envy when I am lauded as Jen the Trephinist, Single-Handed Squelcher of Human Suffering.

To enter, just leave a comment. Any comment will do, but if you need a prompt, you might share an inspiring quote or tell a knock-knock joke. If something funny has happened to you recently, that’s also an option. Just write what you feel, okay? The web form is your oyster!

Or, if you felt totally insulted by the phrase “blight of Internet bribery” because you choose to blog in exchange for free products, which I would like to hastily acknowledge is entirely your right (and have you been reviewing a lot of free hair products lately? If so, allow me to note that I have no doubt they are every bit as amazing as you purport, because you look gorgeous), you can just say mean things about how my pores might be smaller if I got off my high horse and accepted some moisturizer once in a while. Maybe you will be the one to win and I will have to give you $50 for insulting me! Think of how sweet your revenge would be then.

Either way, good luck! I like you.

Edited to add: This contest is closed. The winner is Ms. V. Yay!

WHEN MY PETS DIE
That sure was a lucky pet. Now another animal gets to be a very lucky pet!

WHEN I HATE MY JOB
Remember when you were a receptionist and old paunchy bald men just naturally assumed you were stupid and tried to get you to have sex with them and forced you to endure appalling comments about your pretty little face because you desperately needed that $12 an hour they were paying you to use your advanced journalism training to do all of their critical correspondence for them? And when they found out you liked to read, they would say, “What, like … romance novels?” even though you had just fashioned an original proposal for them that included words like “detriment” and “feasible”? And you had to just swallow the anger because you needed groceries badly enough that you were willing to endure their sleazy comments that you would be even more beautiful if you were willing to let them make you smile, and you might feel a little less stressed if you were getting “the right kind of exercise”? Yeah. Let me just point out that you now work at home in your pajamas with a cat in your lap, sipping your tea and watching snow fall outside, for a much better wage. What were you just bitching about, again? You had to edit a particularly tricky paragraph on operant conditioning? Oh. Yeah. Tragic.

WHEN I WANT TO STAB MY EX IN THE FACE
Proportionally speaking, you want to stab him in the face exactly as often now as you did when you were together.

WHEN I MARVEL NOSTALGICALLY AT HOW GREAT MY EX IS, USUALLY WHEN HE IS 800 MILES AWAY AND I REALIZE I NEED TO CHANGE THE CAR HEADLIGHT
Okay, just a minute ago you wanted to stab him in the face. I mean really.

WHEN I AM AFRAID TO DIE
The bad news that you are afraid of is the bad news that you will never get, seeing as you will be too dead for the reception of news.

WHEN I AM STILL AFRAID TO DIE
You were great at not existing. You made it look effortless. You have spent more time not existing than you have doing pretty much anything else. You have literal millennia of experience on your nonexistence resume.

WHEN I AM STILL YET AFRAID TO DIE
I cannot emphasize enough the extent to which you’re wasting your time with this. You should probably just think about something else.

WHEN I AM TERRIFIED THAT MY BOOK WON’T APPEAL TO VERY MANY PEOPLE
Books far more horrible than anything you would ever admit to writing have enjoyed more widespread commercial success than you could ever hope for, so it’s not like the stakes were that high to begin with. You might as well just write what you want to. Maybe, if you are phenomenally, phenomenally lucky, it will be just one person’s favorite book for just a moment. Wouldn’t that be nice?

WHEN I AM TERRIFIED TO EVEN LOOK AT MY BOOK AND MY TYPING IS LITERALLY PARALYZED AND OH MY GODDDD
“Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it.” –Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

WHEN I AM CONVINCED MY BOOK WILL NEVER BE PUBLISHED
You will be lucky to even finish it, hot shot, so you’re sounding pretty obnoxious right now.

NO, SERIOUSLY, WHAT IF IT DOESN’T GET PUBLISHED?
Oh for God’s sake. Technology today is so amazing that you could publish it on Amazon for $0.99 and anyone with a Kindle or even a computer could read it for a dollar. No one is going to make you sell it out of the back of your car while wearing a sandwich board or anything. Do you even have any real problems? Ever? Is there a place more namby-pamby than the First World? Is there a Zero-th World? You live there.

WHEN I AM WORRIED I MIGHT BE MAKING THE WRONG LIFE DECISION
You have made like four thousand decisions and always felt happy that you chose whatever you chose, because you get so excited about everything that only five minutes have passed before your giant decision is reaffirmed in your mind by some other tiny pleasant circumstance. “If I hadn’t gotten divorced right when I did, I would never have found this bouncy ball on the courthouse sidewalk!” You think that can’t happen? What if it were one of those big clear bouncy balls full of glittery blue turbulence they sell at the bookstore? Those ones that you cradle fondly every time you are there while you lament your possession of a life that could not in any way make good use of a bouncy ball of glittery blue turbulence? Yeah. That’s what I thought.

WHEN I AM INJUSTIFIABLY HESITANT
Just do it.

WHEN I AM BAD AT SOMETHING
With very, very few exceptions, it is not possible to be good at something without being bad at it first.

WHEN I FEAR SOME INNER LACK OF APTITUDE
Practice has been scientifically isolated as being far and away the largest factor in accomplishment.

WHEN I FEEL STUPID
You can’t feel stupid unless you just managed to learn something. Congratulations!

WHEN I DECIDE THAT I AM FAT AND UGLY
If you could get a fresh new genetic roll of the dice, right now, under the condition that you had to take whatever random DNA you wound up with, would you? No? Then you lucked out. Shut up.

WHEN I AM HURT OR ANGRY
Very few people roll out of bed every morning and say, “Today I’m really going to try to suck on purpose.” It is really not very likely that you know any of them.

WHEN I AM AFRAID
You’re okay. (repeat)

WHEN I AM SAD
Without this, happiness, gratitude, and empathy would all be impossible. Look at you, industriously setting useful emotional benchmarks for convenient comparison purposes.

WHEN I BECOME CONVINCED THAT NO ONE REALLY CARES ABOUT ME
Go read it. Again. Come on, go read it. You’ll feel better.

WHEN I AM STRICKEN BY THE NOTION THAT I WILL BECOME LONELY AND DEPRESSED WHEN I AM ELDERLY BECAUSE EVERYONE HAS BABIES AND FAMILIES AND I DON’T
Your favorite thing to do is curl up with the cat and read a book. You routinely turn down exciting social engagements on the weekends just to do this. Your idea of an exciting time involves a bowl of mashed potatoes, a cup of tea, and a space heater. You have galloping social anxiety and have frequently wished a pill existed that could make you go deaf for the day. You haven’t spoken to a human being for four days and you didn’t even notice until I pointed it out. You have made elderliness into a lifestyle choice. Technically, everyone was born to get old, but you? You really were.

WHEN I BECOME CONVINCED THAT WHOEVER I’M DATING IS THE LAST STOP ON THE LOVE TRAIN AND NO ONE ELSE WILL EVER BE INTERESTED
Never once has this proven to be a problem. Should your luck ever run out, that will be an exciting opportunity to do all the things you always sort of wanted to do but were too considerate to force your significant others to suffer through, like enduring the adjustment phase of the No-Poo method or joining the Peace Corps or living in a yurt.

WHEN I AM WISHING I HAD A PONY OR A BOAT OR A MACBOOK AIR WITH A SOLID-STATE HARD DRIVE
You have more amenities and luxuries at your fingertips than kings and queens used to. Two words: indoor plumbing.

WHEN MY FLESH IS TRYING TO CRAWL OFF MY BODY AND I AM AFRAID OF SOMETHING BUT I DON’T KNOW WHAT IT IS
Wait … when was the last time you brushed your hair and put on some mascara and went outside? It’s called fresh air. People go get some of it sometimes. There’s like a whole figure of speech about it. Maybe you’ve encountered that. Also, it might help to gather some confirmation from someone other than your pets that you are actually visible.

WHEN IT’S GOOD, WHICH IS AT LEAST LIKE NINETY PERCENT OF THE TIME
How on earth are you getting away with this? Enjoy the crap out of it!

WHEN IT’S BAD
Think of it as an opportunity to shave off a transparently thin sliver of karmic debt from the mounting pile of it you have accrued over your middle-class existence. This makes it at least marginally less likely that the universe will eventually spot the error on its spreadsheet that made your life so easy in the first place and then correct its mistake by dropping an anvil on your head.

WHEN IT’S REALLY, REALLY BAD
This too shall pass.

——-
Participant(s):
Blue Yon Belly
Moose
Torpid Trifling

The more each post stands alone as its own piece of writing (without requiring a lot of background knowledge to comprehend it), the happier I am as a reader. As for the content itself, I am not as interested in what’s happening in your life as I am in what you think of it and what you’re learning.

Or you can skip all of that and just make me laugh really hard. I leave it to you.

I was delighted to find the latest three blogs I added to my reader, so I thought I’d share the love.

Steam Me Up, Kid: I have not seen a blog this funny in a very, very long time, if ever. This post, about a visit from the furnace repairman, and this post, about a Christmastime fart, are especially noteworthy.

Hyperbole and a Half: This post, which discusses Craisin barf and breaks down the numbers on a pain chart, wins. At everything. “Hmm. I never knew that about giraffes.”

Irretrievably Broken: I don’t usually comment on posts unless I feel compelled, and I certainly felt compelled to comment on this post about what it means to be in love after getting divorced, which could have fallen out of my own brain.

Happy reading!

For instance, there is no such thing as a happy ending. For anyone. There are happy times and sad times, but each of us only gets one ending, and I’m willing to bet that most of us won’t find it to be all that pleasant. SPOILER ALERT: The main character dies. The fact that so many people would likely accuse me of being grim, cynical, or depressing for pointing out this incredibly basic and universal truth only strengthens my argument that we have abandoned reality in favor of an idealized narrative—one that doesn’t end with our own deaths but with a nice wedding or, you know, retirement party or something. (Gold watches for everyone! Yaaaay!)

And this manner of thinking is fine. You could even argue that it’s a reasonable approach to allowing yourself to enjoy your life despite its harsher realities—the same type of suspension of disbelief that allows you to enjoy the movies you are now attempting to cast yourself in. But this manner of thinking is also potentially disastrous, if you are the sort of person who reads your lines and plays your part whether it’s a good idea or not.

Some people have children even when parenting is not something they’ll particularly enjoy. Some people buy houses they can’t afford. Some people get married when they would be happier single. Why? Because that is what happens next, of course. Some people will spend an unbelievable amount of money on clothes, because these are the clothes called for in the script; this is simply what their character looks like. This is the luxury car their character drives; this is the dumbfoundingly expensive engagement ring their character wears. These props are necessary for identification purposes; how will their audience recognize them otherwise? Which character would they be otherwise?

Some people wait around for plot twists, unaware that, without a concerted effort on their part, very little about their lives is likely to change for the better. Some women cast men into predetermined roles and then experience surprise and disappointment when that commitment-phobic philanderer turns out to be … well, exactly that. But he accepted the role of husband! they might protest, as if that could really be expected to change anything. This wasn’t supposed to happen.

I don’t mean to be overly contrary here, but really: according to whom? Is there a script somewhere?

Go ahead, dress up like the bride, and play your role. Say the words you’ve had memorized since you were six. Film the whole thing. Post pictures on your blog. There’s nothing wrong with any of it, if it’s really what you want, what will make you happy—if you’re doing it for yourself, not your audience. Be careful, with that audience: the more you cater to them, offering up cinematic special effects as quickly as your digital SLR and photo-editing program can pump them out, the more you will feel you owe them when it all falls apart. When you realize there’s no movie called It’s Been Years Since Our Really Pretty Wedding and We Have Exhausted All Potential Avenues of Conversation That Two Human Beings Could Possibly Explore, So Nothing Is Really Going On Except for That Part Where We Both Get More and More Bored and Resentful Regarding the Ways In Which We Confine One Another to Our 2002 Personas, and Oh My God You ALWAYS Interrupt Me Like That When I’m Talking and Come to Think of It, I Kind of Hate Your Stupid Face.* When you realize you ran out of script quite a long time ago, and come to think of it, you actually don’t have any idea what the fuck you’re doing or why you’re here. Cut! Cut!

[*If someone made an independent film with this title, I would be so excited to watch it.]

One of the most stressful parts of divorce is this sense that this is not the ending your audience was promised; this is not what they came to see. This notion is, of course, utterly ridiculous, but listen to any friend struggling with the decision to divorce, and you will hear it: I don’t want to be that person. I am not that person. As if they had simply been assigned the wrong trailer on a movie set by mistake.

The saddest thing about all of this effort, the most profoundly disturbing truth about all of this bending over backward for centerpieces and birth stories and decorating schemes, is that no one else ever even really cared that much. With the possible exception of your mother and your best friend, everyone in your audience has fallen asleep, or gotten up to pee, or is busy trying to open their smuggled bag of Skittles without crinkling the packaging too loudly. We look at wedding pictures, baby pictures; we smile; we feel happy for our friends. But five minutes later, we’ve moved on to worrying about whether getting our bangs trimmed this short was a mistake. We have our own productions to star in, after all.

The random and unintentionally hurtful comment we made about your divorce—or your job loss, or your shoes, or God knows what—is already forgotten by us, if not by you. Even the intentionally disapproving ones, the ones who will tell you that people like you are the reason no one takes marriage seriously, the ones who imply that you are selfish and irresponsible, the ones who openly pat themselves on the back for not being you, the ones who say quite earnestly that they really hope they never become you, are thinking about something else entirely not more than thirty seconds after the conversation is over, even if their words sting you for days. So if I were you, I would avoid constructing a sizable portion of your decisionmaking around pleasing a group of critics who have already forgotten you in favor of this ham sandwich they’re eating for lunch.

Unfortunately, it is not that simple, because even if you manage to ignore those people entirely (and then teach me how, which should absolutely be your next step), you still have an even bigger problem. To make this whole metaphor even more confusing, a part of you is sitting in your own audience, and that part of you might just be the one person in your theater who finds the whole production utterly fascinating. Who loves to watch. Who collects scenes and moments with hands clasped and eyes wide, who sobs openly at your tragedies, caught completely in the moment as she clutches her tissues in that darkened theater, as if tomorrow is not a new day entirely. Be careful, oh so careful, what you choose to do for this part of yourself, because I have this sneaking suspicion that this part of yourself is flat-out insane.

This part of yourself is in love with the character you have created. This part of yourself sets your photoshopped face as her avatar and writes fan fiction about you and would probably (facetiously, ironically) wear a “Team You” shirt if the Twilight people decided to make one. You can’t trust someone like that, or at least you shouldn’t. This part of you sweats over your every move and will be devastated if you gain weight, or announce to People magazine that you are gay, or are photographed without your makeup on, or in any way ruin the illusion. This part of you is convinced that everything you do matters, that everyone is watching as fervently as she is. This part of you is arrogant enough to think you are the center of the universe and insecure enough to let that make you afraid.

This is the part of the post where I would make a point, if I had one, but to tell you the truth, I’m still deciding what, exactly, any of this means. The script is unavoidable, I think, but I’m hoping to at least incorporate some ad-libbed elements. I’m hoping that I can, at least sometimes, behave as if no one is watching. I’m hoping to resist the urge to sell anyone a “happily ever after” where none exists. I’m hoping to at least remember not to take any of this too seriously, if I can.

In a brilliant commencement speech that you should absolutely read before it disappears from the Internet entirely, David Foster Wallace opens with a joke:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

And then, after blowing everyone’s mind like nine times, he concludes his speech by advising these new graduates to remember a seemingly simple truth, repeating it to themselves when necessary: This is water. This is water.

And I guess that right now, that’s all I’m trying to do: write a new script, make a new character, but do it all while remembering that I am even doing it in the first place, in hopes that it will save me, somehow, from living according to the expectations of anyone else and the expectations of that part of me that is convinced that I am hot shit and should continue to prove it.

And when I look up, squint into the spotlights above the stage, and say “line, please,” I am trying to remember to ask myself exactly who it is I think I am talking to, because the truth my ego keeps trying to ignore is that I am the only one here.