Being an adult sucks.
I get ten days of vacation a year. I
don't get extra sick days, so one of them is already gone from when
some asshole in the office came in when he was spewing pathogens like
a golf course sprinkler system. A week is spoken for by our family
reunion, a rather important affair that I'll probably miss part of
even if I take five days, my high school choral teacher is retiring
so I need two days in May to honor the man who made such a difference
in my life, and the last two I'm using to fly to LA to visit one of
my best friends whom I haven't seen since about four hours after I
was handed my diploma. You'll notice I don't even mention Christmas
or Thanksgiving- to be honest I'm kind of just hoping I get a
different job by then and the counter resets. Otherwise I'll see if
there's any way to fly from South Carolina to Illinois and back on
the same day.
I was nine when we got Maggie, the
ADHD-riddled border collie who I'm certain is smarter than most
college graduates and whose energy levels are comparable only to
Barry Allen on PCP. That means she turns fourteen this year- if we're
lucky. If you feel tempted to gaze back to the previous paragraph and
see if I ever mentioned going home at any point, I'll save you the
trouble- I didn't. I will probably never see my dog again. For some
reason I didn't realize that until today. It was always just so easy
to go home before. I one time bought a ticket at midnight for a 5 AM
train home just to land a joke. But now I'm nine hundred miles away
and I'm expected to sit in a gray windowless box for 40 hours a week
at arbitrary times regardless of whether or not there's actually work
to do and while there's no gun to my head, there are consequences for
doing whatever the fuck I want that outweigh the sentimental value of
throwing the ball one more time or burying my face into her
binary-colored fur.
I know none of this is unique to me and
that in all reality the fact that I have a stable job that is more or
less on the career path I want to be on makes me extremely lucky
especially considering the destitute conditions the majority of the
world lives in but honestly I really don't give a shit because I miss
my fucking dog.
Here's where I wrap this all up. Where
I learn some life lesson, where I find the silver lining, where the
protagonist changes. But that's not going to happen this time. This
time it just has to suck.
