My Jenn-eration

Everyone has been sick here. It feels like it has been weeks since any of us has had a good night’s sleep and it feels like that way probably because it’s true. And this morning I woke up and everyone was all plugged in with the shades drawn, marinating in their own germs and I just snapped. I could not stay inside even one more day: especially not a stunningly gorgeous and unusually warm December one. So I started screaming at everyone that we all needed to get dressed in the next ten minutes because we were going ice skating. Like, immediately. It was a completely random ice skating emergency. I have no idea why this break with normal life happened. It’s just that I was so tired of being tired, of laundry and Tylenol and screens and I needed LIFE. Real life with capital letters and the kind that you can fill your lungs with. And everyone was running around looking for pants and Phil was asking if there was time for a shower and I was like, “… a shower?! Are you mad?! We have to...

Phil and I have one of those coffee makers that uses the little pods and you just push a button and it produces coffee. They are terrible for the environment and I’m sure there are all sorts of other reasons why we shouldn’t be using them. But we can’t decide on what other kind of coffee maker to get and so, as a default, we stick with this one. We are literally too tired to decide and so we keep pushing the button each morning, grateful for the opportunity to drink coffee and decide one less thing. This tiredness played out in real time the other morning as I tried to make a cup of coffee using this coffee maker. All I had to do was literally push a button. Monkeys would actually be able to do this. Monkeys would remember to put the cup of coffee underneath the thing where the coffee comes out, not next to it. Clearly, I am not a monkey. And as I watched the coffee spill all over the counter and swirl all around the bottom and outside of my cup and nowhere near the inside ...

Sometimes I write things that do not make sense. I usually do not share this stuff. Unfortunately for you, that is not the case today. Life feels very busy right now. Busy isn’t always bad. But this feels like the noisy, transactional kind of busy that leaves you tired and unsatisfied with life. It isn’t the good, productive, and fulfilling kind of busy that shouldn’t be discounted as an equally valuable undercurrent in our lives. It’s the bad kind of busy. Right now I’ve got 5,062 unread emails. Now in fairness, I’m bad at staying on top of this stuff but that truly seems like a lot. This holiday season it just feels like more than ever before all we are giving each other is the gift of email, of this non-stop banter and back and forth. A perpetual volleying of words and tasks that literally never ends. Have any of your emails ever actually ended? Like with a, okay, thanks, this is done now, goodbye? No! They never end. They just live on and morph into new mindless tasks that a...