Re: I need a day?

Our collective sanity in insane times

Dear (Name Redacted):

I hope this finds you well! I’m writing to say that I’d like to take advantage of our company’s wellness policy and request a day off tomorrow. I know that the policy is somewhat ill-defined in terms of what constitutes a “wellness day,” so I will do my best to articulate what’s happening, and perhaps you can tell me if this would be covered under our current policy?

- I have been feeling a little off lately? Like a little foggy, a little achey, a little tired. Nothing’s wrong wrong, exactly, no fever or sore throat - I just feel kind of out of it, generally, I guess?

- I watched a woman get shot in the face yesterday? Well, I mean, I watched a video of a woman getting shot in the face. From a bunch of different angles, over and over again, actually, because it keeps popping up in all the social media apps that I still keep checking even though I’m trying not to do that as much anymore. It’s just kind of hard to miss. This guy in a mask, holding a machine gun, just like — shot her in the face? She looked nice. About my age.

- Oh, and then I watched this press conference where the federal government called her a terrorist? And then I opened Twitter, or X, I guess, even though again I’m really trying not to do that anymore because it’s owned by this guy who is the richest person in the world and also apparently can do whatever he wants and no one stops him even though there’s some pretty broad consensus that he’s a terrible person actively making the rest of the world worse at every opportunity? Anyway, I read a lot of tweets sharing her poetry, with captions like “that bitch had it coming lol” and, I don’t know, I guess I was thinking about how if a guy working for some kind of federal secret police ever shoots me in the face, I’ll be really bummed if my writing got distributed all over the internet as justification for why I deserved it.

- I need new tupperware and I tried to buy it on Amazon but all the brands were like, XYGOOL or BURPALOO or WEVROOMYYY for four straight pages of results and I just didn’t want to say, if someone says “hey, nice Tupperware” like, “Thanks, it’s WEVROOMYY”? So I just sort of scrolled past page after page in a dead-eyed, numbed-out stare because even though I try to thrift most things as a good global citizen who is aware of the climate crisis and I don’t want my money to go to another cartoon villain person who owns more than any single human has ever owned basically in the course of human history, thrift store tupperware does kind of give me the ick, so, I don’t know. My leftovers are in a Ziplock.

- I’m also out of milk. I know that I’m out of milk because I texted my friend yesterday who lives in Minneapolis, and we talked briefly about how she’s terrified, how she never felt unsafe in her city until now, how she’s hoping that I will pray for her, if I still pray. And then as the little dots were blipping across the screen I opened my fridge and I was like, “Oh, I’m out of milk,” and something about the cognitive dissonance of needing to hold both “I want to find the right words to text my terrified friend” and “get milk” in the same instant made me go into a full-body shutdown, like someone just went bbrrrrrrripppppppppp and pulled the power cord and I went offline and dim for a moment. Anyway. I need to buy milk. I could really use a day to buy milk. Milk is like $4/gallon where I am, which feels high when I think about how much milk little kids need to drink and how the minimum wage is $7.25 so an hour’s worth of labor isn’t even 2 gallons of milk, but weirdly the dairy farmers aren’t doing so great, either, for reasons I don’t fully understand?

- I keep thinking about all the things that are still good about being a person in the world and naming them in order to hang onto them, to give these Decisively Good Things Worth Hanging Onto some arrangement and clarity in my mind, even though the act of doing that still sort of makes me feel like a drowning rat? Like I’m driving home from work making a list of my favorite things, in a deranged Julie Andrews sort of way, because I just watched a woman get murdered by a man with a machine gun who called her a fucking bitch and shot her in the face and the federal government was basically like “lol p0wned” and then they pepper-sprayed some kids in front of a high school so I’m driving home listing out in my brain: The chubby part of baby thighs. Chocolate croissants. My students. (Mostly). Twinkle lights at a cozy bar that’s not too loud nor expensive. Old friends. Felted ornaments. Old bookstore smell. The concept of flirting. When Harry Met Sally, which is a perfect film, no notes.

- My Zoom is acting weird. My email, too. I think it’s AI’s fault. It keeps trying to update me to Claude or Grok or Gemini and when it does that I want to pull out a shotgun and blast the computer into a mauled smoldering rubble skittering across the room but I don’t do that because I worked very hard to pay for this laptop and it’s the mechanism upon which most of my life runs now. I do google “how to disable AI” which is never as helpful as I want it to be. Perhaps I need to change what I’m querying, because what I really want to know is “how to disable AI use for everyone other than the folks working on like, cancer detection maybe, because for many other facets of the human experience it appears to have just made us all dumber and meaner and more gullible and it’s bad for the planet and it’s destroying literally everyone’s jobs for no reason in a vast slow-motion trainwrecky kind of way and also is really flooring the gas pedal on no one agreeing on shared truth anymore? Also everyone from high school keeps using it to post photos of themselves dressed in sparkly elf costumes for some reason.”

- I’m trying to focus on work, I really am trying, but it would make sense if you thought I was underperforming. I wrote a really kind of intense email to you earlier about the dangers of neoliberal thinking vis a vis how it relates to our company’s five year vision slide deck and then I deleted it because a) it’s none of my business and b) I’m really not angry about the five year slide deck, I’m angry that the future that was promised us is so severely compromised by the actions of some of the dumbest and cruelest people, the kinds of people who are supposed to be punished for their wrongdoing and instead appear to be in charge of The Department of Even More Heinous Crimes At the Expense of Everyone Else While Everything Gets Worse, and I’m usually pretty numb to it because we’ve been boiling alive in this lobster pot of piss and shit for the better part of a decade but then I watched a woman get shot in the face by a masked man holding a machine gun and the government was like YEP and I am so numb I am so numb I am so numb I am so fucking numb I watched a lady get shot and then I made enchiladas for dinner and then my coworker was (in my opinion) totally wrong about the use of language in paragraph 3 on slide 17 and made a snippy little face at me and it made me have to turn my screen off and weep at a meeting real quick for a second, and it’s not because of the meeting or the snippy little face, it’s because the only times I can access my human range of emotions like anger and fear and frustration and irritation are when they hit me in normal, common, everyday situations because everything else around us in the world right now is so abundantly Not Fucking Normal that I do not know how to react to I just watched a woman get shot in the face and then I logged on for my 10:30 meeting.

- I’m angry because my mother didn’t raise me to stay in a bad relationship and yet it does in fact feel like, for a whole bunch of us, we are in a very bad relationship with this country with no exit strategy and no one is coming to say “it’s time to stop hitting now.” Our country is a boyfriend who gets drunk and yells and hits things and deflects on the IMO valid question ‘hey so can we just real quick triple-check those files to make sure the president’s not a pedophile’ by invading a foreign country and murdering a woman on the street in broad daylight and threatening to invade Greenland within the last week alone, and yes of course this country has been a bad boyfriend in so many ways before and this is not new and mostly I am so numb to it that when it actually does still shock me, once the shock and fear and anger at what is objectively so, so, so, SO indefensibly awful subsides, I’m left with a strange gratitude that I can still be shocked and therefore am still human. That I have not yielded all of my humanity away entirely. That, after a decade of slowly allowing my attention span to atrophy and be commoditized and sold in tiny ten-second intervals of endless scrolling, I am still capable of being horrified and outraged and sickened, and there’s pleasure in that feeling for a fleeting moment, followed by a deep despair that no one in any position of power seems to know what the fuck we’re supposed to actually do about any of it. I’m angry because I got good grades and I’ve worked hard all my life and I care deeply about other people and it should count for something and it DOES count for something, but also, yeah, a guy in a mask could shoot me in the face with a machine gun and the government would be fine with it, and and and well that’s a lot to take in, honestly, so I don’t want to log onto Zoom today, because I’d like to spend a day, or even just ten minutes of my day, trying to feel something, anything, anything at all.

We’re not supposed to carry all of this. None of this needs to happen. We don’t have to live like this. Why are we living like this?

Anyway. I’m not sure if any of this applies to the wellness policy, but let me know if I might be eligible for consideration. Hope you’re having a great day.

Regards,
A nice white lady
(they’re shooting nice white ladies now, you know)

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Rest in Peace, Renee Good, whose last words were “I’m not mad at you,” a fact that has broken me in some fundamental way to learn.