I’m terrible at keeping it a secret: my favorite time in the week is when A works from home. We spent the past month building a home office in a one-bedroom apartment, and I’m happy about the result. Monday is Uni day for her. I find it endearing that her Statistics course is throwing her for a loop a little bit.

“Work is so great!” I think to myself on Tuesday. My onboarding period is somewhat odd because of two separate parental leaves in my team. Now that my fellow designer is back again, I have to conclude that she is an utter blast. A attempts to use her iPad as a sidecar but doesn’t get the audio right. This makes it so that I can hear all of her pupils wrestle through 1984. When she discusses a particular rainy scene, a girl says “like, I don’t know, it’s, like, just typically English”, and we both smile.

After work on Wednesday, I take a bike ride on A’s super fast ebike and almost run over a young woman in Vondelpark. Running after dusk without lights should be prohibited. I bike for miles and get lost a couple times, one of the perks of living in a large city like Amsterdam I call that. I plan to go to bed early, but find myself drifting in and out as we watch the second impeachment of Trump until past midnight instead.

On Thursday, my Now page is published on nownownow.com. After a beautiful day at the home office, I’m excited to play around with the Apple Watch I got in the mail when my mother calls me at 9 p.m. On speaker phone, she pours a wide variety of complaints into the room, and I tell her I don’t need her parentification¹. It’s no use expecting that she will remember what I say three months from now, so I tell her the truth.

I accidentally have myself a total Miracle Morning on Friday: I meditate on kindness, I take a walk in the neighborhood, and update my finances. We hate-watch the Surviving Death episodes on mediums. A tells me she’s been to more than one seance in her life. I wish there was a separate TV channel just for medium weekend retreats.

On Saturday, at 990 days of sobriety, I sign up for a queer-friendly AA meeting. Not drinking is easy, but I haven’t begun to connect my alcohol abuse to the rest of my life, and it makes me feel weird. I spend the better part of the day tinkering with my personal site.