The three ways I waste time are extensively researching vacations on TripMasters, looking at beach houses in Pismo Beach on Redfin, and playing Sudoku. I found a website that offers AI-generated tarot card readings, and this was a time tunnel I fell into one night last week.
I asked it questions I would ask a real-life psychic about life, career, trips, and beach houses. The responses were positive. Real-life psychics like to keep things positive as well, so whoever created this computer mystic nailed that. One card in the overall reading was worth noting.
I pulled Tower for my “present” card, and the interpretation provided is that I’m currently living in denial about something. It must be that I believe a computer psychic, but I wanted to dig deeper.
I haven’t been single for this long in almost twenty years. Even after I got divorced, I’d have a new boyfriend one week after a relationship ended. I like the “partnership” of hanging out, going to eat, and having someone to travel with, but in this last year, I fell in love with my alone time. I can read till midnight or fall asleep at eight pm, and eating dinner is as well thought out as I want it to be.
I laughed out loud through Ali Wong’s latest special on Netflix. Maybe I had it all wrong by going out with people living in perpetual adolescence. After my liberation from marriage, I think my vagina Freaky Friday’d with The Statue of Liberty. Its motto became, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” and the Statue of Liberty’s motto became, “Give me your doctors, engineers, and lawyers.”
I’ve been telling myself I might be one of these single-for-life people because it is so nice to do whatever I want. But maybe I’m lying to myself and should enjoy this time, as it won’t last forever.
Yesterday, I went to a spin class at the gym. After the class, a man on the bike in front of me got off, turned around, and stared into my face. At first, I smiled, and thought, “Oh, this man fancies me.” But, when he stood there and kept staring, I thought, if he isn’t adult-special-needs, then this mother fucker is surely a serial killer. I diverted my eyes from him, but I felt him continue to look.
If you’re thinking, “Alicia, stop looking so hot and this won’t happen.”
I can assure you this was not the case. The cycling class started at 6 am. My face takes time to unfurl when I wake up, like a flower. It takes a couple of glasses of water and hours to reach my fully dazzling state. In the locker room after class, standing in the mirror to blow dry my hair, I realized my eyes were bloodshot. I looked like I took five bong loads or I was testing body spray like a lab rat, and I took it right to my eyes.
Maybe he worked in medicine and thought I was spreading double conjunctivitis around the gym. Assuming a man is a doctor based on his inability to maintain social norms by holding uninvited eye contact is a huge stretch of the imagination and very dangerous if I were in pursuit of a healthy and viable partnership. I’m assuming he’s saving lives, but when confronted with the truth that his job is restocking bandaids and Tylenol on the shelves at Walgreens, I’d probably say, “Close enough.” And then end up in another relationship that goes nowhere fast.
What I’m trying to say is if I go for another relationship, I refuse to be the captain in the captain-save-a-ho dynamic, I want to be the ho. Actually, I am okay with being co-captain.
I should be consulting a psychic about the location of my son’s Nintendo Switch, which I hid after he threw his controller in a rage fit after an exhausting day that should have been wrapped up with sleepy time tea and House Hunters International, not a series of games on Fall Guys that he found himself uncharacteristically doing poorly at. He lost devices for a month, and I hid them in such a brilliant, never-to-be-found hiding spot that I have to undergo hypnosis to remember.
With his no-devices punishment, he has to watch TV with me. Maybe all his friends online are wondering where “GamerBoy69” has been. It might be a blessing he loses the switch because he’ll have to come up with a more clever gaming handle - maybe a name he understands.
I try to widen the scope of their cinematic knowledge by making them watch classics like Psycho. But they refuse to watch anything black-and-white. Besides Dumb and Dumber and Ace Ventura, we aren’t allowed to watch any movie “made in the 1900s.”
We currently have a two-person recliner couch where the recliners are broken and permanently pushed out. When we want to get on the couch, we have to take flight and jump to clear the two feet to the actual seat. I usually sit in between Kiki and G, which is where the recliners divide into two separate operating systems. So I lay back on a divide, where one side of my body is slightly more elevated than the other.
During TV time, I dive deep into my time wasters: TripMasters, RedFin, and Sudoku. I want to take the kids to Greece next summer, and I’ve spent close to a hundred hours figuring out the cheapest week, the hotels we should go to, and a strategy to break up the flight from Santorini to Sacramento, which is 32 hours long.
Last winter we went to Mexico, and I forgot to pack Kiki's underwear. She tried to wear the smallest pair I brought for myself and was walking around the hotel room looking like a blonde Mowgli in The Jungle Book. We decided to wash her underwear every morning in the sink and hang them out to dry like it was in the 1940s. Thankfully, we wore bathing suits all day long.
This year, we aren’t escaping the chill by lounging in the tropics. I’m buying a new couch instead. The spacious modular sectional will be the perfect seat while I drift off to Pismo Beach, win the Sudoko world championships, and consult online psychics, sandwiched between blonde Mowgli and GamerBoy69, happily living in denial.