I am feeling chastised by my tea bags.

The latest one says, "The unknown is where all outcomes are possible; enter it with grace." Inside my head, the tea bag says this in an exasperated voice, more like: "For god's sake, try to enter it with some fucking grace, unlike your usual pathetic MO." So here, on the precipice of this big life transition into the unknown, I am trying to muster some fucking grace.

This mostly involves keeping the plants watered and eating things other than tortilla chips. Sometimes. Last week I ate some raspberry sorbet, which I feel is a more graceful thing to eat than queso dip straight out of the jar with a spoon. 

I realize that the tea bag is not meant to be censorious and that my reading of it is entirely about my own longstanding feelings of self-doubt and inadequacy. But the demands of the moment do not exactly make adequacy easy to achieve.

The contractors are here working on the basement all week and my finished manuscript is due at the publishers on Friday. I am in the footnotes/bibliography/permissions phase and have been for several days now. It never occurred to me that The Chicago Manual of Style would ever come to play such a large part of my emotional life. But here we are.

I have typed the sentence "I am in footnote hell" into a few emails. Scarily, this had led the data-mining algorithm that rules our lives to switch all the ads I get on YouTube. They used to be dominated by ads for Vrbo vacation homes. Now they are almost all suicide prevention/counseling/antidepressant ads. This, I think, is going too far. While figuring out how to get permission to reprint text from a now-defunct one-off 1937 magazine is tedious, I'm not going to kill myself over it. Not while I still have all these tortilla chips to eat.