"Cooked" is a word I'm seeing a lot in group chats.

By early afternoon the first stirrings of anxiety would make themselves felt, then slowly build like a gathering storm. They would remember the supermarkets, closed on Sundays, their client calls scheduled for Monday, the work due by Friday. They would part ways without making plans and get on the U-Bahn to their one- or two-bedroom apartments with

the person you are this week, who finally put pen to paper or clicked open their computer.

Without tasting even a speck of the hurry in Janet’s oatmeal, which was so rushed it was like eating the calendar of an executive,

In the university program where I was supposed to be emancipating myself from the kitchen, preparing myself to go back to New York having at least answered the question of my own potential, the novelty and thrill had thoroughly worn off. I could not find the fun or the urgency in the eventless and physically idle academic life. It was so lethargic

minor thing that happened during the day and by the time I was done, I turned it, and everything else, into a catastrophe. Like a dog with a bone, you couldn’t wrestle it away from me.

That’s life in the suburbs: pretending that nothing is bothering you while you eat something shitty.