A Dubious Record
So, let’s talk about last week. I set a dubious new record. With the exception of Wednesday, when I went to the gym for an hour, I did not leave the house once from Monday through Friday. Not once. I descended the stairs and opened the front door to retrieve the newspaper (8am) and the mail (5:30pm), but otherwise I was in our apartment. This is not good.
I didn’t intend to sequester myself this way. Monday and Tuesday were blurs of TV-watching, understandably, but I still could have made time to at least go for a walk around the block, just to get some fresh air. I have tons of work right now (never something a freelancer can complain about, much as she might want to), but still, there was time for a quick walk or a drive to the grocery store. By the time Friday rolled around and it occurred to me that I hadn’t left the house, it was too late to do anything about it other than feel a bit alarmed.
This must change. I need to make a concerted effort to leave the house. That might seem like a strange thing to say, but consider my life: a steady stream of work received and delivered by email; a job that ties me to not only my computer but also to my printer and internet connection; the fact that we have just one car and Andrew takes it to work most days. For anyone out there with a job outside the house, consider your own workdays—from home to work, and back again. Some days you’ll go out to dinner or something like that. Some days you won’t, particularly if you’re trying to save money for a two-week trip to Japan. My life is the same. It’s just that my commute consists of moving from my bed, to my desk, and then maybe to the couch later on.
This post is not a complaint—in general I love working from home and consider myself quite lucky that I continue to sustain it—but rather a reckoning. If I don’t get out of the house more often, Andrew and I will have to stop joking about my becoming agoraphobic because I’ll actually have become so. I’ll have to stop paining vivid, funny scenarios about forgetting how to interact with other human beings, because I will have actually forgotten.
I felt a little shell-shocked this Saturday, when Andrew and I left the house to go to his office for a few hours. We stopped at Wal-Mart afterward (it was a big day out!) and we forgot our cloth bags in the car. The cashier proceeded to put approximately one item in each plastic Wal-Mart bag. “Please,” I said, indicating the box of spaghetti she was about to put into its own bag. “Just put it here, with these other things.” She glared at me and—I do not exaggerate—threw up her hands before complying. I have no idea what I did wrong; maybe I would have known better had I not just spent five straight days without leaving the house.
Or maybe she’s given me a reason to forget my leave-the-house-at-least-once-a-day mission altogether.
I didn’t intend to sequester myself this way. Monday and Tuesday were blurs of TV-watching, understandably, but I still could have made time to at least go for a walk around the block, just to get some fresh air. I have tons of work right now (never something a freelancer can complain about, much as she might want to), but still, there was time for a quick walk or a drive to the grocery store. By the time Friday rolled around and it occurred to me that I hadn’t left the house, it was too late to do anything about it other than feel a bit alarmed.
This must change. I need to make a concerted effort to leave the house. That might seem like a strange thing to say, but consider my life: a steady stream of work received and delivered by email; a job that ties me to not only my computer but also to my printer and internet connection; the fact that we have just one car and Andrew takes it to work most days. For anyone out there with a job outside the house, consider your own workdays—from home to work, and back again. Some days you’ll go out to dinner or something like that. Some days you won’t, particularly if you’re trying to save money for a two-week trip to Japan. My life is the same. It’s just that my commute consists of moving from my bed, to my desk, and then maybe to the couch later on.
This post is not a complaint—in general I love working from home and consider myself quite lucky that I continue to sustain it—but rather a reckoning. If I don’t get out of the house more often, Andrew and I will have to stop joking about my becoming agoraphobic because I’ll actually have become so. I’ll have to stop paining vivid, funny scenarios about forgetting how to interact with other human beings, because I will have actually forgotten.
I felt a little shell-shocked this Saturday, when Andrew and I left the house to go to his office for a few hours. We stopped at Wal-Mart afterward (it was a big day out!) and we forgot our cloth bags in the car. The cashier proceeded to put approximately one item in each plastic Wal-Mart bag. “Please,” I said, indicating the box of spaghetti she was about to put into its own bag. “Just put it here, with these other things.” She glared at me and—I do not exaggerate—threw up her hands before complying. I have no idea what I did wrong; maybe I would have known better had I not just spent five straight days without leaving the house.
Or maybe she’s given me a reason to forget my leave-the-house-at-least-once-a-day mission altogether.
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