[These little problems — they’re not yours, they’re mine]

Mundane drama follows me. Or maybe I seek it out. I can only assume that if you’re reading this, you might care to hear about it, so I’ll try to include many of the grey details. In the words of Jeanette Winterson, I’m telling you stories. Trust me.

+ Some birds have made their home inside my ceiling, just above the acoustic tiles. There’s a golf ball-sized hole on the exterior of the wall just above my door. That’s how they got in. I’m convinced that new babies have hatched, because I constantly hear screeching in several off-key notes at once. They must be begging their mom for a worm. Then there’s this scratching noise, which must be the mom hobbling around, arranging the nest on top of my ceiling. They’re mostly quiet at night — mostly — but they wake with the sun, and I consequently wake with them. This is not good for someone who works until midnight and beyond. I put in a workorder to have them relocated and then withdrew it when Phil told me the mom wouldn’t have anything to do with the nest once it’s moved. I felt ashamed for not being able to live symbiotically with nature. But when those little peckers (pun intended) woke me up at 5 a.m. screaming to be fed, I decided that as long as I’m paying $600 a month to live in a single godforsaken room, there’s not room enough for me and them. So I refiled the workorder and talked to the woman at the front desk, who said they relocated birds all the time, so it’s no biggie. They’re still up there, screaming through the daylight.

+ I babysat three kids today. I don’t remember, as a 5-year-old girl, ever shedding my clothes and hopping into the tub with my 8-year-old and 2-year-old brothers — without the babysitter’s permission — and then getting out of the tub and pretending to be a tiger, crawling on all fours, still naked, shaking the water off of me like an animal, getting the walls and everything else in the house soaking wet while my towel lies silently, unused in the hall. I remember understanding what the word “no” meant, and I remember being taught that incessant screaming is not an effective way of communicating. I’ve never been an 8-year-old boy, but I imagine that had I been one, I never would have pelted the babysitter in the head with a dodgeball when she wasn’t looking, or rang the doorbell an obscene amount of times so my sister could open the door and slam it in my face over and over and over and over… I’m not saying I was a perfect child, or that any kid is as good as his or her parents like to think he/she is, but I am saying that the word “kid” can sometimes be used appropriately to signify a baby goat, since goats are really a sign of Satan. Like a crack fiend, I did it for the money.