An unemployed personnel at rest.

Or attempting to rest, anyway.

Canada is on fire, which means Michigan, conveniently located next door, has been sitting under a layer of smoke thick enough to make the whole idea of Pure Michigan feel temporarily fraudulent. The air is murky, breathing feels strangely laborious, and I’ve been sneezing and sniffling constantly.

This is supposed to be my little Michigan town of thirty-five thousand people and an impressive number of fireflies. Slightly bigger than Vestal, population 29,111.

Normally charming.

At the moment: yellow sky, unhealthy-looking crops, questionable air.

Michigan and I are not getting along right now.

Very incompatible.

Being suddenly unemployed has also produced its own algorithm.

I have watched so much YouTube that my brain feels thoroughly pickled. There are, naturally, a few videos I keep replaying—the seasoning liquid in which the brain pickle is currently marinating.

Strangely, I still don’t feel particularly bored.

My days are simply much simpler now.

So I’ve started treating this period as an exercise in two things: emptying and filling.

First, emptying.

Scan the magazines and get rid of the physical copies. Throw away the aggressively colourful socks and all the shopping bags I have somehow collected. Inspect the things I bought out of anxiety and determine how many of them I ever actually needed. Occasionally stand in the middle of the room and ask whether any human being really needs to declutter this aggressively.

Then continue anyway.

At minimum, vacuum. Wipe the dust from the large surfaces that are least annoying to clean. Tear up ambiguous old mail and throw it away. Get rid of the temporary clothes—the ones that no longer fit, don’t suit the occasion, or belonged to some version of my life that has apparently expired.

Then, filling.

Pack all the winter clothes into boxes so they are ready to be shipped at any moment.

Figure out which things I cannot use and cannot take with me but might still be worth selling secondhand.

Accept that I barely cook and stop maintaining an imaginary kitchen for the woman I am not. Keep only the essential cookware and use disposables where practical.

More importantly: reduce the anxiety and replace some of it with optimism.

Restore the stamina I neglected while telling myself I had no time.

Go back to the hobbies I always said I wanted to learn properly and finally build some basic technique.

And perhaps most ambitiously, rebuild an ordinary biological rhythm—move at reasonable intervals, sleep and wake at reasonable times, allow the body to remember that humans were not designed to remain folded into furniture indefinitely.

There is also a strange little internet product I found called Link Bouquet, where you can apparently send someone a bouquet made of links.

This feels appropriate for the era.

Even affection now has a user interface.

Other than that, there isn’t much to report.

A simple life does not generate much chatter.

There is uncertainty, obviously. The future is vague enough to be unsettling. But, fortunately, it is not the kind of anxiety that is eating me alive.

It is simply there.

A little fog in the room.

Rather like Michigan at the moment.

For now I can clear things out, pack things up, sell what I don’t need, regain some strength, learn a few things properly, and try to place the days back into a sensible order.

Not exactly a dramatic reinvention.

More like system maintenance.

Which may be enough.

CHECK-IN complete •⩊•

That’s it for this week.