Averil Dean's Blog, page 5

Three

I’m supposed to complete a self-evaluation at work. You’ve seen one of these, I’m sure. A long series of questions covering various aspects of the job and how good you think you are at it. It’s divided into categories and subcategories: How organized you think you are, how careful, how accurate, how skilled. One to five, line by line. The bosses fill out the same assessment, and afterward you get together and compare the answers.

What kind of sadistic shit is this? Imagine the horror of rati...

Sweet Alyssum

Work is okay. Better than okay, when compared to the shit-show of 2021. That was an awful year. I’d lost my long-term job to COVID and had to find another. At first, it seemed I’d landed on my feet at a pediatric therapy clinic, where I worked the front desk and managed the schedule for ten providers and a passel of wild-eyed children. I loved those kids, by the way. One of my defining features as a human is how much I love children; it’s something everybody knows about me, including the kids, w...

Dots

So what am I doing here? The kids are all tiktocking, instawanking, tweeting each other the bird. They are creating content—or that modern kind of FOMO-incel discontent no one has yet learned to manage. It’s all about the algorithm, the views. It’s the subtle act of throwing oneself onto the hyperfueled bonfire for the sake of a thumbs-up emoji.

Is that me? Maybe. Maybe it is. I am, after all, here.

I’d like to think that it’s not me. That I give no fucks. I am, after all, here, in obscu...

Twig

Betsy says we should write every day. She doesn’t believe in writer’s block, and thinks it’s simply a manifestation of some other mental ailment. Depression, anxiety, fear, rage… There is resistance in the community to use the term “writer’s block,” as if to name the malady by its most distressing symptom is to give it air.

I can understand this. Writing is scary, and each person has to manage the fear in a way that minimizes the problem and makes it feel surmountable. Of course there are pr...

Apple

I didn’t stop writing. In case you’re wondering, I did not. Though the years have continued without my particular commentary, they’ve continued just the same, one upon the other, and I have not stopped noticing the slips and eddies of my own life and the lives of those around me. It’s been my habit to write and read what I’ve written to the point of satiation, then destroy it, Ethan Hunt style, five four three two one. I write when no one is watching and get rid of the evidence. I don’t have the...

Smooth

At work we were talking about the relative rates of decline in our health of late. We’ve been drinking more, eating our feelings. A lot of us were caught at one of life’s crossroads when the pandemic hit, and never made it to our intended destination. This is what happened to me last year, when I finished my nutritional therapy course and got my certification. I’d planned to become an NTP at the clinic where I’d been employed for six years, but that opportunity withered during the months of quar...

Mantra

It’s hard to let go. To be one among billions, and really appreciate your smallness against the mind-blowing scope of the cosmos. It’s hard to come to the point in your life when you begin to know yourself and understand that you are nothing — and at the same time everything, but only to yourself. It imposes a certain humility which doesn’t come easily to a society obsessed with fame and the unparalleled value of the individual. We want so badly to be special, to make our atom of time become rel...

Webs

I took off my mask at work today, just chatting with one of the therapists at lunchtime. She said I looked different than she thought I would — her mind had filled in the blank with a different nose and mouth for me. I felt the same. It’s like opening a gift you were sure would hold a new blouse, and finding instead a pair of slacks. Nice, but not what you expected.

We’ll have mask stories later. We’ll remember how we made the first one out of an old tee-shirt, following along with a YouTube...

The Prankstinator

What a bad day. Funny the way you know sometimes, before unclosing an eye, that the day’s got nothing good in store for you whatsoever. Your car might fail to start, for instance. You might burn your tongue on hot coffee. The dog could run off, or the cat—or a husband, I suppose, though a catastrophe like that would seem to warrant a more vivid descriptor than the run-of-the-mill bad day like I’ve had, where you just feel sad and hurt and kind of mopey, as if the day has fallen victim to a tepid...

Poncho

Journal prompt: Describe your current mood.

Stoned. Not profoundly, not to the point of confusion or paranoia. Just kinda stoned, happy stoned, ready to crawl into bed. I took half an edible and I ate a bowl of red lentils and drank some hot cacao that’s made with powdered mushrooms, and I roamed around the rooms downstairs checking on my plants. If the previous sentence has the whiff of patchouli, that’s probably because I’m going through an earth-mother phase—letting my hair grow out, eat...