Anonymous Rants

Every year I announce I am packing light. Every year the van contains a hexayurt, six coolers, a costume trunk, and a second costume trunk for the costumes that did not fit in the first trunk.

I keep a grocery app, a notes list, and a whiteboard on the fridge, and I still come home from the store with three onions I did not need and none of the milk I went for.

Whoever decided every restaurant should be a bare concrete box with a live band: I have not heard a complete sentence over dinner since 2019. I just nod and hope nobody asked me a question.

I have hauled the same sixty feet of EL wire out and back for four years running and have never once installed it. It travels. It sees the desert. It returns. That is its whole job now.

It is 2am and I am fully invested in a stranger restoring a rusted wrench. I do not own a wrench. I have never wanted a wrench. If that man had given up on the wrench I would have been devastated.

We have a kitchen drawer with forty takeout menus in it and we have ordered from the same two places for four years. That drawer is not a drawer. It is a museum of ambition.

MOOP is not somebody else's job. If you cannot leave without a truck full of your own trash, you overbuilt, and the people doing the final sweep are picking your sequins out of the ground in November.

My review praised me for being the person who fixes the things nobody else wants to touch. That is not a compliment. That is a job description I never applied for and am not being paid for.

The self-checkout has called for help four times, weighed my bananas twice, and accused me of theft. I am doing unpaid work and being audited for it at the same time.

I clap when the plane lands and I will not be apologizing. Somebody flew a hundred tons of metal through the sky and set it gently on the ground. They should hear about it.

I sat down with a coffee for a twelve minute video and the first four minutes were about a mattress. My back does hurt now, but from waiting.

Radical self reliance does not mean showing up with a tent and borrowing my water, my batteries, my sunscreen, and my patience for six consecutive days. Bring your own. Then gift the extra. That is the order.

Someone booked thirty minutes to tell me an email was coming. The email arrived during the meeting. We read it together, in silence, and then discussed the email we had both just read.

My partner folds a fitted sheet into a perfect square, calmly, on the first try, while talking to me about something else entirely. I have never trusted another human being more.

Woke up at 3am certain I had left the stove on. Made it all the way to the kitchen before remembering I have not turned that stove on since March. Brain, what exactly was the plan there.

4am, deep playa, an art car rolls past playing something I will never identify again for the rest of my life. Twelve people on the back, nobody talking. That is the whole reason. That is the entire reason.

Every site wants my email before it will tell me what it actually sells. Put one sentence at the top explaining what you do. One sentence. I am begging.

Found out my partner has been quietly redoing the way I load the dishwasher for six years. Six years, never said a word. That is either love or the longest running con in history.

I have been saying oh yeah, I saw that about a show I have never watched for so long that I now hold strong opinions about the finale, assembled entirely from other people's complaints.

Building camp together is the real compatibility test. Anyone can manage a dinner date. Try putting up a shade structure in a thirty mile an hour wind while both of you are wrong about the instructions.

The office installed a very fancy espresso machine the same month they froze raises. I have never been so wired and so broke at the same time.

I rehearse phone calls in the shower, land every line perfectly, then dial and open with hey, it's me to a person who does not have my number saved.

Took the full week off with no signal, came back braced for disaster, and found that my inbox had quietly solved three of its own problems. Turns out I am significantly less load bearing than I feared. Slightly wounded. Mostly relieved.