The Daily Grind

When ever I read memoirs, especially funny ones, I wonder what the writer’s typical day looks like. Thus, while reading Samantha Irby’s excellent We Are Never Meeting in Real Life this week, I thought I’d keep track of what I did for two weeks, so I could give my readers a sense of what I do, if they’re ever curious.

First, though, I need to establish a baseline. This would get really repetitive if I told you that I wake up in the morning or that I eat every day.

But I do those things.

Here’s what else I do, in no particular order:

1. I feed the cats.

2. Several times a day, I listen to Osiris, my old, arthritic, limping cat, loudly howl for me, when he realizes I’ve left the room and that he doesn’t know where I am.

3. If Anubis, my son’s cat, who is always doing a Ron Funches impression, is in the bathroom when I’m peeing, I suddenly find myself peeing with a cat on my lap. He often stands and tries to put his arms around my neck, not always being careful with his claws. Then he rubs my face with his.

Does he think we’re making out?

If so, it’s extra weird since my son calls me the cat’s grandma. We are not in a Nick Swardon movie, Anubis!

This toilet routine, though, is still nicer than when he does it on the bathroom counter–because then he always chooses to do this when I’m putting on eye makeup.

I’m not sure why he started to do the toilet thing. His now-deceased sister used to, though. And he would watch her. Does he think I’m not happy to pee unless there’s a cat on my lap? Does he know jumping up there will make me think of her?

It does.

4. I spend a lot of time missing my little girl cat and wanting another kitten.

5. Most days, I put on makeup, though not very much. I’ve never had the patience, really. And I’ve never learned how to do smokey eye.

6. I don’t ever take my eye makeup off, because I’m lazy, but I do run an oxy pad over my face after a shower, and that gets the rest of the makeup off.

7. Most days, I shower, but I do so at night because my hair takes too long to dry–hours. I put leave in conditioner in, and then a cream or gel to fight frizz, and then some little clippies on the top, so that in the morning, my hair’s weight hasn’t pulled all the body out.

8. I take medicine. Over the day, I take two different allergy pills, two puffs of allergy nose spray, two hits of a steroid asthma med, another asthma med, seven pills for muscle spasms, five pills for gerd, two pills for bile reflux, birth control, a high blood pressure med, four little pills for migraines. The gerd meds keep me from absorbing all the minerals and vitamins I need from my food, so I have to also take a multivitamin, potassium, calcium, magnesium, coq10, b complex, b12, d, iron, etc.

On some days, when my schedule works, I drink a potion for stomach stuff–but I can’t do it every day since it has to come four hours before any other meds, which is tricky due to how all the others have to be spaced. Sometimes I drink aloe vera juice. I take probiotics. I eat yogurt (which I used to hate, but Nosa has changed me).

Most days, I also have to take pain killers.

Almost every day, I have to take a pill for diarrhea. The trick is not taking it too soon or too late–I have to be able to teach at some point, after all.

9. I cook or I eat leftovers from what I cooked before, since I am incapable of making a normal amount of food. I get this from my grandmother–both the desire to cook and the inability to make only a few servings.

10. And I clean up after myself. Take note, ALMOST EVERY GUY I’VE EVER DATED: that means not just washing the dishes–it means putting away the ingredients, cleaning the counters and the cooking surfaces, and the sink I just dirtied by cleaning the rest.

11. I pee. A lot.

12. I alternate tea and water through the daytime, starting with hot tea, british-style, in the morning, and then moving to iced tea that I make myself–sweetened, but not the way they sweeten in the South. I like to drink a liquid, not a syrup.

I learned to alternate with water when I got a kidney stone when I was 19. The doctor told me that Southerners have a lot of stones–because the sweet tea we drink builds up little calcium balls. I’m still shaky on the details, probably because this was explained to me when I was in a great deal of pain (without even the comfort of insurance).

One of the people in this house has to make a new pitcher of tea everyday.

13. At night, I switch to wine and water, or a cocktail. Or just whiskey.

14. When I am in the car, in the kitchen, in the bathroom, or at my desk, I am either listening to NPR or my music. If it’s music in the car or the bathroom, I am singing, loudly.

15. I check my email several times. I do a Facebook check usually once a day. I have a Twitter, but I almost never look at it.

16. I stretch in the morning and do the light exercises I can handle. Four mornings of the week, I do so while watching the beginning of Seth Meyer’s show from the night before.

17. I argue with my mom–in my head–every single day. Especially since the travesty of the election. I forbid my mother to talk about politics with me because she says things like “Now that Obama’s President, we’re going to lose our rights as white women” and “it sure is cold–why do all those people think the Earth is warmer” and “your insurance company denied that medication because of Obama.”

But every single day, I wake up to news of what my mom’s President has done. And so my brain says, “HOW CAN YOU STILL LIKE HIM? OH, MY GOD! YOU WOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN OKAY WITH THIS IF OBAMA HAD DONE IT. HOW CAN YOU THINK HE’S ON YOUR SIDE,” etc.

This argument is not productive or fun, but I don’t know how to make it stop. My mother represents Trump voters in my head–but one I’d like to make see sense, because I love her, but who will never see sense because a) she has no ability to think logically or critically b) she might be brain damaged or mentally ill (she exhibits a lot of symptoms of BPD and is a lifelong alcoholic, which causes damage, evidenced in c) she is a Trump supporter.

Sometimes, I can stop myself–I say, “You are arguing with someone who is not here.”

I learned this technique in a book.

18. So then I’ll start thinking about something else, but there’s a good chance it won’t be productive either.

I’m a worrier–apparently, children who grew up in messed up environments tend to worry. We focus on things that could go wrong and try to figure out how to stop the bad things. We are trying to have control because we grew up without a sense of it. I mentally “script” a lot–sometimes, even though I know I won’t change someone’s mind, my brain keeps rewriting an argument, convinced somehow that if it just finds the right words, everything will be okay.

19. During all of this, I am biting and picking at my cuticles. I don’t realize I’m doing it.

I used to bite my nails, but then I figured out that I could stop by keeping my nails painted.

Yes, that’s why they are always painted.

But it just upped the picking.

20. Another symptom of OCD: I have a song in my head. All. the. time. At least once a week, it’s the theme from The Muppet Show. But that’s not at all the weirdest thing in the never ending jukebox in my head.

If you have no idea what that’s like, you’re very lucky.

21. I have self-critical thoughts about my body several times a day too, whether it’s about my weight or whatever my body is doing wrong. And then sometimes I remind myself that my weight is hard to keep down because it’s doing all these other weird things.

But my most insane thought is when self-critical Karma says, YOU REALLY NEED TO GET IT TOGETHER AND GET MORE WORK DONE!

If you know me, you know this is insane because I can’t do any more work.

I’m actually able to argue with self-critical Karma here: No, I can’t grade papers while I stretch. And watching Seth Meyers is not a waste of time. He’s a delight, and so he probably lowers my blood pressure, which is too high, self-critical Karma, because you make me worry and work so much.

22. Speaking of work, I typically start when I get up at 6:30 or 7. I stop 12-14 hours later. Every day. And I count all the doctors appointments and grocery runs as work because in addition to my regular job and my side job, I’m self-employed. As both boss and employee and machine, I need to make sure I’m lubed, that I have enough printer paper, etc.

For most weeks of the year (summers too), I’m teaching. I have admin work, committee work, official and unofficial mentoring, and the stand-up club (we meet/workshop every week). I’m always prepping the next class, week, term, prepping for a conference, writing and editing my stuff. I’m the editor of a journal and President of a society. Melissa and I are usually talking ourselves into the fourth book after our current one.

I used to work until bedtime.

Then I went to therapy, where we addressed, among other things, workaholism, which we decided was a very . . . um . . . productive response to childhood chaos and feelings and shit.

So now I can give myself permission to stop a couple of hours before bedtime. And I don’t feel as guilty when I have a long lunch with you or when I go to a discount movie on Tuesday evening, or when I take the very rare day off to go pick up wine in Placerville, or when I decide I should try to walk around the block in the middle of day, before I remember while walking on a windy Spring day in Davis simply won’t work.

23. I put on topical analgesic after I exercise, but also at other points during the day. I have a medical center sized vat of it in my bathroom–yes, the downstairs one, which the guests use, because a) I exercise and work downstairs b) I refuse to be ashamed of needing vats of pain relief. And if you love me, you know I need it too. And if you don’t love me, WHY ARE YOU IN MY HOUSE?

24. I also often wish my house were cleaner.

25. And that stuff in it matched. But then it would be even worse when I broke things, I guess, which I constantly do, because I am not practicing mindfulness enough when I get a cup down from a cupboard or walk by a doorknob (this is maybe the nicest way I can say I’m the clumsiest person in the world).

But it’s cute that I still live in a fully geeked out apartment of organized chaos where nothing matches, right? I’m eclectic and adorkable, right?

Right?

26. I run my roomba, Sisyphus, in at least one room of the house.

27. At some point in the day, I worry about money a bit and dream about getting out of this cycle where I’m working too much to pay off medical debt and bills (among other things), which keep coming since I’m hurting myself by working so much.

28. Each day, I wake up tired and in pain. I go to sleep that way too.

29. I read before bed, but the piles of New Yorkers and books just keeps getting bigger.

30. I make my bed, not perfectly, but enough that it looks more welcoming when I return. Also, I would rather the cats do their shedding on the comforter.

31. I pack my backpack for the next day and make sure I have everything I need for the errands and classes and Spring allergy nosebleeds.

31. I talk to the boy at some point, to at least coordinate if we’ll be eating together or apart the next day. He says he would rather I text him to let him know I want him to empty the dishwasher instead of yelling in the general direction of upstairs, but

32. I often don’t know exactly where my phone is. Much of the time, it’s on my bedside table or the bottom of my back pack, turned off. That’s usually why I’m not answering–I have no idea you’re trying to reach me.

33. At least once a day, I go to the computer to send an email. But then I see another email that I need to answer. So I answer that and some others and completely forget to send the initial email.

34. Since I pee a lot (see above), I replace the toilet paper roll. If you hang yours the weird way where you have to search around the back to find the start, I’ll still be friends with you.

But if you’re worried that people might be offended by seeing the roll’s–what?–cleavage?–butt crack?–then we are probably not friends, especially if you’ve seen where and how I live.