A Day in the Life

I woke up for the same reason I've awoken for the past two months—the mental patient sleeping next to our bed was struggling against the confines of her straitjacket. Though it was five in the goddamn morning, this was a cause for celebration. She had slept through the night for the first time. Five AM formula sessions are fine, those I can take. It's the half-conscious two AM bouts that kill me. I'm lucky that Willow has a great mother who takes charge more often than not.

I should've insisted that I be the one to feed her at five, instead of giving in and accepting Pam's offer to let me sleep while she held the bottle. It was nice lying in bed. Too nice. I overslept a bit. My salad consists of only spinach and chicken due to time constraints. I did, though, make time to update my iPod classic with a couple new albums, just in case this new Florence + the Machine shit doesn't work out (it's decent so far, I guess).

The Route 60 bus was on time, mitigating somewhat my exasperation at having to take the bus in the first place due to a flat front bike tire. SEPTA dropped me off at the comically trashed corner of Kensington and Allegheny Avenues. Dead-eyed prostitutes shuffled past. Two greasy dudes with homeless-style tans quibbled over money sitting on the steps to the El. There was seriously so much trash that on the sharp NW corner, someone had set up an orange cone barrier around a pile of debris two feet deep (which begs the question, did the barrier surround the trash already there, or did people add to the pile of garbage when they saw a nice orange barrier to hold it?). If this sounds like I'm, um, trashing the way this neighborhood lives, maybe I am, but fuck, I love it too. I feel alive when I'm standing on the corner of K&A.

The El drops me off on the West Market St. side of City Hall, and so from there, to get to my work building, I walk through the new LOVE Park, which has unfairly been maligned at "sparse" and "lacking character" but which I like quite nicely. Construction workers were yet again "fixing" the fountain, which is a full-time job in Philly at this point. As I approached, one of the tall construction workers came up to me and gave me a big hug. I realized it was my old friend Mike from college. Hadn't fucking seen him in about five years. I assumed (falsely) that he had moved to Alaska permanently. This happened at about 7:15, fifteen minutes after PoYB published the Wolf Parade post, which included a small anecdote about Mike in the stray observations. Again, first time seeing this goofy fucking kid in half a decade. Coincidences are fucking strange sometimes. We exchanged numbers, and I'm hoping we can grab lunch at some point before he moves back to Anchorage. I'm hopeful, but also, I know how these types of things usually turn out.

Work starts promptly at eight, which means that when eight o'clock rolls around I'm the only one from my unit here. Working for the city means that being punctual makes you a freak. This freak signed in and awaited his first phone call of the day. The supervisor showed up. She is in a terrible mood approximately 50% of the time. We had a nice conversation about where to get good crabs in the city, so it seems like today might be the other 50%. If you're not a city worker who's angry and bitter by the time you are three years from retirement, you are a freak. I guess I'm glad I don't have a freak for a supervisor.

Summer has made a slow job even slower. I often internally debate with myself during the slowest moments in the day as to whether I made the right choice or not, switching to an office job from my previous in-the-field position. I feel like I sacrificed something, coming here. As miserable as my previous job made me, I felt fulfilled too, ya know? Like I was actually making a difference in my city, head-on. Here, sitting at a desk all day, I feel nothing about my job. It's a nonentity in my life. It's just a paycheck. It doesn't make me unhappy, but it doesn't make me happy. It's just a void. Let's be real here, this is the perfect time in my life for a job that makes me feel like this. I have a lot going on otherwise that I can more than sufficiently fill that void with. The baby does that all on her own, honestly. I don't need a job that completes me. But I will eventually. I will eventually make my way back to being a proper social worker.

But not any time soon. For now, I'm just chilling at my desk, answering the occasional call, and filling my time with reading books and surfing the web and, yeah, blogging a good amount (clearly). So that's what I did this morning. I'm typing this and a couple other PoYB posts that are going up this weekend. I answered a really creepy call from an anonymous person who implied that a child was locked up in a house but literally had no relevant information to back that up. And so on.

My stomach has been grumbling all morning too, if that's relevant, I guess? I'm on a new diet called "intermittent fasting" during which I'm only allowed to eat during an eight-hour time period during the day, and fast the other sixteen hours. So my tummy is waiting patiently to be filled with spinach and chicken and an apple and a no doubt healthy portion of ranch dressing. I don't know if this diet is working, even though scientific studies have shown that it might. I haven't seen a difference yet. Maybe I need to actually consistently eat healthy in addition to the fasting, I don't fucking know. I just wanna get rid of this fucking beer belly.

After clicking on Reddit mindlessly for like the fifth time, I looked up, and it was four o'clock. Time to start packing up. I leave twenty minutes early from work every day. No one gives me shit for it, because like I said, I'm the first one in literally every morning. First one in, first one out—this is my motto. It had been months since I took SEPTA home from work, and in celebration of my homecoming, the El was twenty minutes late. And of course, when that happens, the El shows up fucking PACKED. My car was full to the brim with a bunch of suburban-looking jabronis with "DISCOVERY" on ID lanyards around their necks. Not from around here, eh? Get the fuck off my subway train! They did, one stop later, but it's SEPTA, so it took another fifteen minutes to get from 15th St. to 13th St.

I was supposed to meet Pam and Willow at Greensgrow Farm to pick up our Summer Farm Share produce (god bless urban farming). But since SEPTA was unkind, I missed the trip to the farm. There had been a brief disagreement via text about whether the vegetables would be okay sitting in the car for an hour if we went out to dinner. I didn't think they would, and Pam was more laissez-faire about it. But I've been attempting to get better at choosing my battles in life, and the well-being of cauliflower ultimately did not seem like something I should be arguing with my wife about. So we didn't argue, we compromised, and she put some of the more fragile-looking groceries (red butterhead lettuce, fresh blueberries, Asian Micromix, two pounds of orchard peaches) in a cooler.

To my surprise, Old Richmond's new neighborhood joint, The Pineville, by all internet appearances looked open and ready for business. Their website indicated a menu and hours. Google had the same info. I assumed they were open, based on the evidence available to me. But they say don't believe everything you read on the internet, and Pam and Willow found the doors still locked tight and brown paper covers over the windows. No soft open tonight for the K***s. So we went to our consummate happy hour destination, Bait and Switch. Only this family could have a car full of fresh produce and decide to go out for fried chicken and beer instead. Whatever. Fuck it. It's the weekend.

After we polished off a couple Cape May Brewery IPAs and a Bait Bucket (french fries topped with clam chowder), we headed home. Because of the holiday, trash day was moved back a day, and so, I did my least favorite chore, and took out the trash. I hate it especially in the summer, because I have to squeeze past the white-hot air conditioning exhaust fan to get to the side tunnel, carrying a recycling bin covered in crawling ants. Today it was especially hot. And we had a special piece of trash to deal with! You see, our backyard butts up against the side of a semi-abandoned house from Mercer St., and being semi-abandoned, the house is falling apart. Yet another piece of the crumbling roof was found in our garden the other day. It wasn't bulky or heavy or anything, just a frayed piece of roof tar, maybe two feet wide, thin and somewhat deteriorating. I had placed it along the side of the house, and now it was time to put on some gloves and move it to the trash pile in front of the house.

Except, now, upon further inspection, I'm seeing that this shit is fucking gross. There are all these fuzzy yellowish slug-looking things on there. I don't have the stomach to now research what the fuck they were, but trust me, they looked weird and disgusting and freaked me the fuck out because I am wimp when it comes to that kind of shit. But still, I had to get the damn thing out of the backyard, so I found two creepy crawly-free spots, and picked it up. But THEN as I'm doing so, a larger rodent darts out from under it. It was so quick I couldn't even see what it was, but something went from its spot under its tar shade to the side of the deck, where it jumped off into the neighboring yard and disappeared. I have to believe it was a scurrying mouse, but who knows? It was fast, I couldn't see, maybe it was something more insidious than even that. Pam, thankfully, did not hear me exclaim "JESUS FUCKING CHRIST!!!" and I did not even mention the roof trash at all when I went back inside, so if she's reading this, hi Pam, I saw a mouse, don't be alarmed, it was outside!

I then showered, vigorously.

We've been reading to Willow since she was born, because even though she clearly doesn't understand the words we are saying, its been scientifically proven that babies benefit from hearing a variety of words at any age. Like, they get smarter just from listening to their parents speak words besides "goo goo" and "gah gah." We finished Stephen King's 11/22/63 the other day (barely, through a veil of thick tears), and so today we started the Harry Potter series. It was my first time cracking open Sorcerer's Stone in a long time, and the opening chapter was still as wonderful as ever, complete with flying motorcycles and morphing tabby cats. I cannot wait to read these books when Willow can actually appreciate them. I can't wait to share in her joy while she discovers the wonders of Harry Potter for the first time. (I also can't wait to hear her opinion on the Whomping Willow).

We watched GLOW, we decompressed, we let Willow sleep before we woke her up for torture time (a.k.a. bathtime). I keep waiting for social services to come knocking after every bath she takes, her screams are just that piercing. But hey, we'd rather have a loud clean baby than a quiet dirty one, right? I say that to myself every time I have to wipe massive shits off her ass (thankfully my baby momma is a nurse and has dealt with shit bigger than a baby's, and she reminds me of how much of a wuss I am in this context often).

And so, after a day of crowded bus rides, jovial construction workers, wilted carrots, confused muggles, swift vermin, failing diets, and a baby that didn't puke ONCE, we all laid down for bedtime. It was ten o'clock. We stayed up late, my goodness! It's not a school night (I don't work Fridays), so we had allowed ourselves the privilege of being conscious when the sun went down completely. We prayed, not for world peace, but for peace in our bedroom, that maybe the good times would continue, and Willow would let us sleep for more than three hours at a time.

This was Thursday, July 5, 2018, and it was a good ass day in the life.