Child 1: Why do you have to work?
Child 2: I wish you didn’t have a job.
On a Tuesday in early fall, I got up at 5:10 a.m. and took the train two and a bit hours down the Hudson with all the businesspeople. If you get a window seat, you see some castles out in the river. They’re crumbling, marooned on islands, like someone pulled up the drawbridge 100 years ago. One little stone structure has pointy turrets but is hardly bigger than a mailbox. It’s perfect, this unreachable mailbox by an unreachable castle, each removed from the other.
Before I went into the tunnels of Manhattan, I placed a remote order at a coffee shop. As we neared Penn Station, my seatmate–a businessman–didn’t move. I picked up my backpack and put it on my lap so he’d see that I, too, have a business agenda. He remained sat, blocking the aisle, where people were already gathering, ready to get off. Next I stood, my head folded under the overhead rack, and he continued to sit, unmoved by me contorting my body into a candy cane. Finally, as people filed off the train, he rolled like a stone away from the entrance of my cave. I strode toward the E train. The turnstiles for the subway have tap-to-pay now, but even that wasn’t fast enough to get me through and onto the E train that was waiting as I approached. If I had bummed that guy in the face and gotten myself off the train sooner, I would have made it. I felt the singe of that old exciting commuter fury. Of knowing how to be a Purposeful Adult on the morning merry-go-round. On the next E, I politely put my backpack on the ground by the pole as an example to all.
At Gregory’s Coffee, I glided past the counter where my order was waiting and sang out, “Bathroom code?” The worker paused. “Are you going to buy something?”
“It’s there on the end!” I said, entering my third hour of being up without coffee. She looked begrudgingly at the sweaty cold brew and bagged croissant. “It’s 48-48,” she said. The tables were all empty. It was a failed Third Place. What was she saving the bathroom for? Why do we turn jobs into forts?
My office is across the road, and it has the works: a swipe entry to the elevator banks, a different swipey to access the 29th floor, bad coffee, La Croix, and a field of cubicles in bloom. One of my friends got a job recently, and she loves to go in just for the coffee and the chance to sit somewhere different. We both worked freelance from home with kids in the past. These things are what we discuss now.
Up in the high-rise, the sun hit noon, so a work friend and I walked uptown for lunch to a place that had just opened. It smelled like new paint and freshly cut electrical tape. The host led us around a wall to an empty section by a bar. “This table?”
“Sure!” We said.
When he handed us our menus, the lights went off. A man came running to the fuse box behind me, snapping switches willy nilly. “That work?” He called out to the restaurant. “ᴺᵒ” came the answer. He flipped more switches then disappeared. The lights remained off. A chirrup sounded from the ceiling.
We ordered thali to share, and some sides. “You can’t share the thali,” the waiter said apologetically. “Let me check, but I don’t think you can.”
Something crashed to the floor in the kitchen. The ceiling chirped again: the high bleep I know from the Nests we have at home, which are extremely temperamental, always wincing wherever they have been twisted onto the wall.
“Sorry, only one thali per person,” the waiter said on return, looking flustered but attempting polish.
“Okay, so cancel all the other stuff, and just one thali each,” said my friend. Meep, said the ceiling.
“Of course, so sorry, thank you,” said the waiter. People were rushing about, driven by their new routine: plates! water glasses! menus! It was possible the restaurant had opened that exact hour.
The food was great. I love Sri Lankan. Who doesn’t love a flaky thali dipped in a curry, or a potato that could be sweet or could be dangerously hot? Quite a lot of responsibility for a business lunch hour, though, all those metal side bowls, and we did our best work–MEEP–to put it away, only the waiter kept arriving with additional treats. “Enjoy,” he said, laying two additional bowls of vegetables by my wallet, on which I had sat my credit card, out and ready.
“Your detector seems to be going off,” said my friend. The waiter couldn’t hear or understand him. “The detector up there is beeping,” he said again as the acoustics of pressure-washed dinner plates pinged off the walls.
“I’m sorry, what?”
“It’s delicious,” we said, and he left, only to return a few minutes later with the tiniest dish yet of a dessert.
“It’s carrot,” he said proudly. And it did appear so, like a spiced sweet potato pie filling, but carrot. I ate a half-teaspoon and was full.
Back at the office, I was head-down in my cubicle when a Higher-Up came by. Staff who aren’t in regularly just hotel, so I had picked a desk that felt right that day vibes-wise for me. “Now you’re here!” he said. “Last time you were over there!”
“Here it is, where the magic happens,” I said waving at my laptop. We laughed.
It was time to go. The reverse journey is the same: go down the elevator, walk to the subway, ride to Penn, transfer to Amtrak, travel up the river to an Uber to home. The castles were out there, but I didn’t see them this time.
*
Noodles had a work trip the following week—a work retreat—also down the river. “I went to the little zoo and saw some falcons and owls and a beaver,” he texted me from a Holiday Inn. The retreat was being held at the same place we got married 17 years ago, and he spent part of the time roping colleagues into recreating photos from our wedding album. The budget director played me, doing his best to look radiant at the altar.
“When does dad get home?” the children asked.
“Thursday,” I said, showing them a photo of people sitting in metal folding chairs looking at a bridge, and then a video of a beaver.
“You are very lucky to have two parents with jobs,” I told them.
let yourself be missed
a thing japhs brings up at least once a week:
grappling hooks
it turns out these are real things
and you can buy them on Amazon, where even verified customers don’t know why they bought one
goodies
Eat poop you cat is now out from behind paywall—good AI reading
Then We Came to the End is one of my all-time favorite books. I read it once a year and have always wanted MORE, and recently discovered Ed Park’s extremely funny Personal Days, the perfect novel for the age of bullshit jobs.
knew it when I saw it: millennial face
Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen are doing a newsletter project of some sort on picture books. It’s called
and you can sign up now! They are, to my mind, geniuses (I once went to a reading where toddlers stood on their parents’ laps holding Mac + Jon books over their heads like groupies in a mosh pit), so I imagine their newsletter will be pretty great. spent 24 hours on the subwaygreat case study on how “Peloton moms” made Boggs bags (the satchels that look like Crocs) a thing—solid reporting from Amanda Mull as always, and a good bit of insight into the purchasing power of mom-socials and ~ergo~ the power of the mom internet (sorry dads)
I know everyone is hankering for more of Nobody Wants This—may I suggest the very good Oz rom-com Colin From Accounts? It’s on Paramount+ and maybe on Tubi, and has a dog in it
possibly my favorite reel
I have a really great newsletter coming in about two weeks. I hope you can wait until then.
okay, that’s about it, no, wait, one more thing
Bogg bags! My instant first reaction was "wow - cool!," but given they now seem mandatory at our community pool I just wanna say, "Ladies, it's getting embarrassing. Some of ya'll need to join me at Goodwill Outlet so you can have your own smoking hot beach bag from the 90's -with a sandpail print for about $.89" Of course I never say this because I am truly a weirdo at our pool. Last summer I did see two dads with the same flamingo trunks that for sure their wives picked out. I don't know if the dads noticed. 98% sure the wives did.
I laughed no less than 10x and then I stopped counting. Diary of a Mad Worker? Keep this going and you will have best seller. BtW I look at those castles on the Hudson every time.