I go to work at this job where we pass around a blue and white football, known as The Blue and White Football Game. Or, TBAWFG (pronounced “tub-wa-fug” or Zoboomafoo). We play it when we aren’t working on our B2B clients. We’re small and single-minded enough that we don’t necessarily need an HR department yet. As far as I know, everyone goes to the same church. All the same, we try to avoid political and religious discussions, preferring to discuss which character we would be on Parks & Rec. I make $14/hr running our webinars, researching our company’s industry, and trying to make sense of brightly colored but hopelessly jargon-filled Google Adwords lessons on landscape-oriented PDFs.
At work when I need to take mental breaks, I think about how the money I’m making is making my home nice. I think about home. look through Bath & Body Works, Sephora, and Amazon. Sometimes IKEA too, because I really need a nightstand, a small stool to sit on when I apply my makeup so that I’m not hunched over my dresser, and that one specific type of lightbulb I neglected to get with my IKEA lamp the last time I went shopping there. At the same time though, I’m not in a rush to acquire more material goods — I know I need to be saving for all those trips I want to take, the emergencies I know will come up, the wedding I want to make happen someday and will think about as long as I’m actively dating someone I really, really like. It doesn’t matter if I don’t spend all the money right away. What matters is that having it expands my mind’s definition of luxury.
I work a solid 37.5–38 hours a week — enough to qualify me as full-time with a few extra hours to work on my personal life. I didn’t even know I had that time until my summer internship just ended — I used to work almost 50 hours a week between that and my full-time, and now that I know what it’s like to be constantly in a work state of mind, all my time is that much more savored slowly.
Home
I get home around 4:30pm. I practice Norwegian on my phone while relaxing on my full-size, non-decades-old mattress with a mattress topper and my first comforter set, from Target. I look around my room and remember the first two weeks I lived in this house how I was assembling furniture left and right.
I live in a house with two other people who I willingly chose to live with and consider my friends, and also because it means that collectively we can all afford a much better place. I have my own bedroom in this house. It’s older, but the floors are glossy hardwood, there is no dining table or any other unneeded and obnoxiously shaped furniture, and I own the TV, the Chromecast, and the Playstations. My desk is out here by the window where I can watch the neighbors park and go, and sometimes a bunch of kids come outside from the youth counseling center playing Pokemon Go. On this side of my college town, the drivers act more sensibly, parents walk their kids to school, and everyone smiles more often at each other than on the “student side” of town where we are all grumpy sweating underneath our two ton-backpacks. Provo may not be the same kind of millennial hub like Seattle, but it feels good to live in the vicinity of adults regardless of age. The sameness that permeates Provo’s culture is something I am content to live with for now.
On the IKEA 2x4 cube shelves, there’s Amazon Basics exercise equipment, with some Forever 21 checkout aisle extras I haven’t used yet.
At night, I go to bed knowing that I’m about to worry about something. So I think about things like am I going to get cavities from all this sugar and soda I inevitably consume to stave off the stress (what stress? I feel it, it enters my body, but I don’t know why). This ends up turning into some sort of nightmarish brain state later on where I am dreaming about but also awake thinking about two sets of teeth growing in the same spot, like a zipper.
In the early morning I spend too long playing a game on my phone, waiting until the last possible moment to get out of bed. This part still feels like college in the sense that my company has a pretty carefree dress code — there’s nothing stopping me from putting on sweatpants on sleepy mornings and applying only the foundation, but even so I revel in dressing up (read: clean & colorful clothes that still fit me comfortably) for a day of mostly sitting in one place indoors in front of a computer screen.
