What am I doing? I am cleaning on my day off. I never expected to be this kind of person. I should spend my weekends doing something I like. But what do I like? I like my job. But I was not supposed to like my job more than my weekend. This is so embarrassing. Tano will come home from biking and do his pets project and I will be having an existential crisis.

List of Meaningful Things to Do:

Read

Listen to music

Write letters to relatives

Exercise.

I decide I will do all these things. But I am sick of Middlemarch, and I am not letting myself start a new book until I finish Middlemarch, so I will not read today.

I put one of Tano's CDs of music no one has ever heard of in the CD player. I write a letter to my grandma. I tell her about my job so she can die thinking I'm stable—if she can imagine a stable unmarried woman.

I pull dirty clothes out of the laundry and go to the gym. I forget a quarter for the locker so I wrap my wallet in my dirty underwear so the yellow part is facing anyone thinking of stealing my stuff. I work out underwearless, which is a good excuse not to use the spread-your-things machines. I do an extra fifteen minutes on the Stairmaster because the Monica Lewinsky stuff on the TV makes time fly. I put up with the men telling me how to adjust the barbells because part of making my life meaningful is to stop calling people assholes. But let me just say, men never adjust other men at the gym.

I shower.

I mail my letter.

I tell Tano I listened to his Steve Reich CD and Tano kisses me because he thinks this means I like Steve Reich.