.SOMETIMES RAW.

We are writing to inform you that Your Body (“you,” “yourself,” “your aging body”) has updated its terms of service, which apply to the use of all your Parts and Areas.

We encourage you to review the updated Terms before you attempt any dangerous activity, such as playing with your dog or walking uphill. Our other legal policies are available in our Depressing Policy Center.

The Updated Terms

I. Food and Beverage

a. Alcohol No alcohol at all. The best choice ever.

b. Caffeine is one of three good things that exist. The others are love and the Fleetwood Mac album Rumours. However, like the relationship between Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, your body’s relationship to caffeine is a productive yet fraught dance. If you consume any caffeine after 1 p.m., you won’t get any sleep and will wake up hating the world. Other People’s Bodies can consume caffeine until 3 or 4 p.m. or even have an espresso after dinner. You aren’t them and never will be. Also, if you have more than two (2) cups in a day, you will become convinced that there must be some kind of “demon” inside your chest and you will never be normal again.

c. Despite your many lobbying efforts, chocolate is still not considered their own food group on the pyramid and should not be treated as such.

d. Drinking prodigious amounts of water won’t solve any of your problems, but not drinking prodigious amounts of water can certainly make a few of them worse.

II. Exercise
a. Your Body and Mind require 4–6 days of exercise per week, unless you want to go to sleep hating the world. Unfortunately, every kind of exercise that you enjoy causes Your Body’s back, knees, or ankles to enter “The Zone of Desolation.” Ashtanga Yoga works best for your body.

b. If any physical pain ever starts to feel depressing, it could help to look on the bright side: if you were a hunter-gatherer, you’d probably be dead by now.

III. The Life of the Mind
a. In college, you would read one hundred pages per day and write an essay every week. Now, any paragraph of any news article that “seems long” gets skimmed, and you frequently question the names of your friends’ children. For this reason, you are encouraged to skip all news and reread the entire works of Virginia Woolf and stick with it even if a character is described with avian features, like having a “beak of a nose” or “the broad face and intense glare of an owl,” which you really hate for some reason.

b. Saying Italian place or food names with an Italian accent doesn’t count as “practicing your Italian,” so you are encouraged to stop believing that saying “alooooora” with a long o is doing anything, mentally-wise. Learn another language. French, Japanese, anything that makes you happy.

IV. Which Organs Still Work

a. Your kidneys seem fine.

b. Your pancreas hasn’t set off any alarms (yet).

c. Liver is in very good shape. Thank you for not drinking.

V. Which Organs Are Touch-and-Go

a. Brain.

b. Eyes.

c. Ears.

d. Skin.

e. Lungs.

f. Stomach.

g. All the other ones.

VI. Psychology

a. Abundant studies demonstrate that staying optimistic about the future helps one remain active and engaged in one’s community, family, and personal wellness. If you ever start to believe that life is a one-way escalator moving downward, ever downward, it is recommended that you stop thinking that somehow.

b. It is crucial to cultivate one’s mind-body connection. Reading a study about the benefits of meditation and saying, “I should keep doing that,” is an important first step in realizing that you have no follow-through.

VII. Service

a. As you mature and move forward in life, you ought to give more of yourself to your community. Since you have so much to offer in terms of physical abilities, wisdom, charm, or general usefulness, consider opening a tiny bookstore.

b. You aren’t old enough for people to feel like they should serve you by mowing your lawn or bringing you food that is easy to reheat, but if you keep making intensely mediocre decisions, those days will arrive very soon.

VIII. Benefits

a. Your age has earned you the right to be cranky. You are allowed, whenever you wish, to say things like “All leaf blowers must die” and “As far as I’m concerned, any grocery store that forces you to use self-checkout machines should be considered a terrorist organization.”

b. Once per week, you are allowed to shudder when thinking about what high school would have been like if social media had been around then.

c. If you ever end up having the feeling that you cannot take it anymore, take a deep breath and tell yourself that this too shall pass.

Moving Forward

You need not take any action regarding this alarming notice. By continuing to utilize your Parts and Movements on or after today, you agree to the updated Terms. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact your Prefrontal Cortex or your Limbic System.

I yawn awake at the painfully early hour of noon o’clock to the pinging of 1,005 unread emails. A voicemail from my boss leaps to the top of my mountain of notifications: “PLEASE LOG INTO TEAMS NOW!!” I take a deep breath and realize it’s the perfect time to grab a cup of coffee and a croissant from the café around the corner.

At the coffee shop, I join a group of working-from-home guys typing away on their laptops. They inspire me to work on my pressing daily tasks: New Yorker or Wordle. Fortunately, I expensed my subscription this month as “emotional support software.” I consider checking my work messages while on my laptop, but I hesitate. My company uses Slack (a communication software), and I understand that as a directive, not a software.

The unbearable stress of upcoming Teams meetings has pushed me to take my first break of the day, but certainly not the last. As a WFH (“work from home” or “will fire her”) employee, I prioritize my mental health. My mind is a temple.

Out of my never-ending pile of notifications, one catches my eye: a new Spotify playlist. It begins with “9 to 5” by Dolly Parton. Her lyrics convey an understanding of the grind of my job, even if I’m only working twelve to four. I desperately need her inspiration to power through.

After my brief two-hour break, I head home to dive back into work. The jumbled, incorrect spreadsheets whose numbers dictate the future of this company were due three weeks ago. Attempting to cope with the strain, I bring my focus to my favorite job responsibilities: walking around the house without pants on, binging a new show, and writing meal-prep ideas that will never come to fruition.

Before turning to WFH, my boss was worried we’d miss the office’s social festivities. He was totally wrong, though, because I attended an ice-cream-tasting event and a public reading from my favourite author last week while working. My boss loves that I’m always working, no matter what I do.

Soon after transitioning to WFH, the five-day workweek turned into a two-day workweek. We call it the “reverse weekend.” The eight-hour workday is a curse from the distant past. Now, I work in five-minute increments and break when my chakras are misaligned. I can also take care of laundry, groceries, and anything involving child care. Picking them up from basketball lessons? No problem, bad reception on the computer. No more milk in the fridge? Bad reception and off to the store I go. Easy.

I do miss a few elements of working in-office while being remote, such as profound conversations (gossip mostly) with my coworkers in the cafeteria. I long for the human connection of “Hey,” “How’s it going?” and “Can you please stop taking seventeen bathroom breaks a day to avoid work?” and “Have you heard that they caught A with S in the car the other day? NAKED! Oh, and he has a new BMW!!”

Usually, bosses always believe that nothing makes employees more productive like being chained to a desk in an office that looks like a hospital. They are wrong, of course, because now my working attitude and loyalty are at an all-time high. I’m loyal to all ten hours of actual work I have done this week.

Speaking of which—this internet is down again. Time to sign off for today.

The other day I had a conversation with a colleague at work who is spending “quality family time” with his child at a family resort. Why do I get goosebumps? Maybe because this has nothing to do with relaxation and free time to me when travelling with a small child. Proof me wrong and I will shut up about this! Another friend told me to go to a farm where the kids can pet animals and stuff. Again, I haven’t heard anything about relaxation for the parents yet. Maybe there is the option to hand your kid(s) over to someone who takes care of them all day long while you are at the SPA? That could work. So, you decided to hang out at this over-prized all-inclusive hotel with your lovely family. Finally, the kid is in bed. Here are some options for you and your significant other if you don’t fall asleep at 8 pm as well (oh sweet parenting, sigh!):

Sit in the bathroom and use your creativity to make it the most exciting place in the entire hotel.

Become frustrated that rearranging the towels has failed to turn the bathroom into the most exciting place in the entire hotel.

Remember that your child’s bed has wheels, and see if you can wheel it into the not-particularly-exciting bathroom without waking them up.

Stop moving the crib in a panic after one of your child’s eyelids briefly flutters open. Spend the next ten minutes silently begging them for forgiveness.

Listen to the peaceful sound of your child’s breathing and feel guilty that it is boring you rather than inspiring you to compose a sonnet.

Wonder if going to the hotel bar would count as negligent parenting, given that you and your child would technically still be in the same building.

Decide that going to the bar counts as negligent parenting, but going to the adjacent hotel room would be totally fine.

Remember that you have no idea who, if anyone, is staying in the adjacent hotel room.

Try to figure out if there is a non-creepy way to determine who, if anyone, is staying in the adjacent hotel room.

Knock on the door of the adjacent hotel room. Experience a huge rush of excitement at the thrill of not knowing what awaits you on the other side, a huge rush of relief when no one answers, and a huge rush of shame upon realizing that you just left your child alone in a hotel room for approximately nineteen seconds. Run back to the hotel room and spend the next twenty minutes silently begging them for forgiveness.

Realize that all new parents must share this frustration when staying in hotels. This has opened up a golden business opportunity to start a company that makes it easy to book entire homes with multiple rooms rather than individual hotel rooms for vacations.

Remember that Airbnb already exists, and this is the thesis behind one of its recent ad campaigns. Sigh quietly.

Reminisce about that crazy trip you and the girls took to Amsterdam over sophomore-year spring break while listening to Cindy Lauper on your headphones. Get nostalgic and wistful about how much fuller of possibility the world seemed back then, even though you actually spent most of that trip vomiting after losing tequila shot contests to your at that time best friend J.

Look J. up on LinkedIn. See that she is now a cardiopulmonologist based in the UK. Feel weird about it.

Worry about what to tell your child about the Amsterdam trip if they ever ask you about it. Decide to hope it doesn’t come up.

Write a letter to your local representative asking what they plan to do about how immorally expensive it is to book a hotel room that includes a separate and closed-off space where your child can sleep, as this has clearly been the biggest problem facing the country since about forty minutes ago.

Play Wordle.

Try to come up with the next Wordle.

Struggle to come up with the next Wordle, and play the mini crossword instead.

Write the lyrics to a hit song inspired by your trip. A good title for it could be “Hangin’ at the Hotel.”

Struggle to come up with lyrics beyond “We’re hangin’ at the hotel / So glad it’s not a motel,” and find a different mini crossword to play instead.

Put on your headphones, and watch an episode of Sex and the City on your iPad before passing out. Realize that this really isn’t very different from what you usually do after your child goes to bed.

Also fall asleep at 7:30 p.m. Finally understand why your child seems so full of energy every morning.