adulting hacks

1. Move your space heater into the icy bathroom during your shower, so you don't find yourself avoiding basic hygiene as a way to conserve body heat.

2. Aluminum-based deodorant will stain your clothing! Discover this after every shirt you own is already gray around the pits. Buy expensive coconut oil-based deodorant and pray that this helps. Google "sweat stains" instead of "deodorant stains" for ways to fix this, because peeps are in denial.**

3. If you only have five dishes, the sink can never be that full.*

4. Cookies are acceptable breakfast. Cookies are acceptable dinner. Look, you just have to get through the winter, okay?

5. Trader Joe's sells lots of holiday food in tins. You can USE these tins, friendo. Mice are your enemy! Prepare!

6. Don't bother trying to kill the silverfish; they were here first, and they'll be here after you too.


* This is a slight exaggeration. I have two mugs, two glasses, two plates, a frying pan, a cutting board, a saucepan, and tupperware.

** If sweat stained your clothes, the entire back of every single one of my t-shirts would be gray. We had a hot summer, folks. Shrug.

adulting like whoa

I got up. I took a shower.

I scanned documents, including paystubs, passport, and my lease. I proceeded to the library to print said documents.

I cycled into Boston to deliver the documents to the proper office. I discovered that I had cycled to the wrong office. (HealthConnector and MassHealth, i.e. ACA insurance and Medicaid, are not administered out of the same office! Who knew. Well, besides the people who work there.) The correct office is a 30 minute ride away from the office I had located.

I got back on my bike, grumbling softly to myself, and proceeded to the Correct Office. (In transit, I discovered where Boston put all its ugly warehouses: Chelsea.) The lady at the Correct Office counter was aggressively unhelpful, so I put in for a number to ask "questions about income change." A different lady explained shortly thereafter that, yes, I was going to be switched from MassHealth to HealthConnector in a couple of weeks due to my job acquisition, but it wasn't a big deal and I shouldn't worry about it.

At this point I was much closer to [large box store] work than home, so I decided that since this week initiates Project Don't Be Late All The Fucking Time, I would just head over to the shopping center and kill time until my shift started.

I went to Target and got Many Adult Supplies, including: dental floss, a new button-down (er, this was because I hadn't planned ahead and needed a shirt with a collar to go straight to work, but I've been contemplating about my need for more work shirts anyhow), and supplies to remove deodorant stains from my shirts (a bottle of aspirin and a mortar and pestle with which to crush said aspirin.) (What the fuck, self. I've become a person who buys a 500-count bottle of aspirin for stains.)

I got coffee. I spilled coffee. I got more coffee.

Work happened; I did many small, annoying tasks. I cycled home. I made soup, using many ingredients already in my fridge. Not only that, it's good soup (creamy potato with bacon), and I will have more of it tomorrow, perhaps for dinner.

Right now I get a knot of anxiety whenever I venture out without a specific goal in mind -- that is, if I go out to take a walk that doesn't end in some kind of adulty task or the possibility of getting creative work done, I feel panic start scrabbling away at my internal organs. This means I don't go out very much, and when I do go out I don't get very far from home, and when I do get very far from home I find myself not enjoying it particularly. There is a steady and terrifying drumbeat of "no time to waste, no time to waste, no time to waste" thrumming at the back of my head.

Which is all to say -- insurance being dreadful and all, because it is -- sometimes it's quite good to get out to Do A Thing, even if it's a stupid tedious foolish thing, because one bikes about and feels a part of the big organism of city life and less like a weasely measly cornfed interloper.

And on we go!