I am on a 33-day streak picking my teeth before bed. I’ve designed a temptation bundle, pairing the activity with a few minutes of garbage television. During these days, I’ve made it through two seasons of Love After Lockup and six seasons of Sister Wives. It shouldn’t surprise you that my watching habit has extended well beyond the time it takes me to pick my teeth. Earlier this week I decided to tone it down and return the temptation bundle to its original intention. Not because I want to watch less garbage television, but because I don’t want Sister Wives to end.

Sometimes I
feel that I am
a
bad
Black
girl
because whenever
my white girlfriend
and I sift through
Netflix
Prime Video
or anything
with a reasonable trial
period
and she says “let’s
watch this
movie or that”
featuring Black stories
I instead
elect to watch a white
narrative
because it’s nice
to forget
about
racism
and the teacher
who called me
a monkey
and
the no one
who called him
out
and
being a bit
Black
and being
a bit
white

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.