well as an updated list of timely topics that I can pick from every morning—maintained and sent out by Eden, the content manager who is based in Atlanta and whose avatar is a blue female Avatar from the movie Avatar, even though people refer to Eden with male pronouns in email chains. Whatever. We’re occasionally supposed to “meet” via Google Chat or Skype, depending on which platform has working sound or video, but since I started a year ago our team Skype calls have mostly been without video. Which is fine with me—I’d rather not remind people of how old I am if I don’t have to, which is the unfortunate effect that staring at my turkey neck on a Skype or Google Chat call—and the occasional and deeply humiliating interruption of my AOL “You’ve got mail!” alert—has on people. I’m certain that the second the call is over all the twenty-year-olds whisper sweetly among themselves about how I remind them of their moms. I’m certain because that actually happened once before we all got disconnected.
As a contractor paid by the piece, I’m expected to submit three to four “articles” a day, each one no more than three hundred to four hundred words, written in short paragraphs and in a snappy style, nothing too taxing for our attention-span-challenged readers, but always including links to “scientific” “studies” that back up whatever dubious point I’m supposed to be making, even if the research sounds made up to me. People love neuroscience now, how it can support almost every single bad habit and instinct we have, whether it’s for spending too much money (money buys happiness if you spend it on experiences instead of things) or earning less money than you need to (income has a positive impact on happiness, but anything over $75,000 is only mood gravy), or inherent laziness (tiny changes in habits are better and easier to maintain than big changes). I’m not sure any of this is true. In the years when I earned a fair amount of money, it made me quite happy actually, no matter what I spent it on.
But that was a long time ago, when a picture book I wrote, There’s a Bird on Your Head, an embrace-your-weirdness manifesto, became a surprise cult classic and then an animated PBS television series. I’d never imagined, as an art history major in college and then in the early part of my career when I was working for Black Bear Books, the children’s book division of a big New York publisher, that I would ever earn that much. During those good years, everyone told me I would go from success to success, that money and opportunity would keep rolling in. But they didn’t. Life is like that. It’s a series of advancements and regressions, the same tide, coming and going, giving and taking away. A secret part of me still believes the current will come back in after all these dry years. But the bigger part wakes up in the middle of the night wondering what will become of the four of us—Gary, Teddy, Charlotte, and me—if it doesn’t.
“Content-generation,” the work I do now, feels like another regression, another failure, but Gary and I aren’t getting any younger and there are bills to pay, so I pursue it with nothing short of desperation. Doing just enough is enough, I tell myself when I pick a topic, knock out a few glib paragraphs, search for the perfect gauzy stock photo of a piece of avocado toast or the silhouette of a silver-haired forty-year-old doing yoga on a wood deck at sunset, then pause to come up with a suggested click-bait headline before hitting “send” and starting another. Magic is everywhere, even in content-generation, like when fabric clogs on a foot model make the perfect visual point for your “Does working at home make you less attractive?” post. Maybe this new career will magically lead me somewhere, to the next step in my proverbial journey, to a pot of gold at the end of a nonexistent rainbow. It’s the fantasy of being saved that keeps me going.
The question of where to put my laptop since my lap is now occupied by the dog is an adjustment at first, until I realize that I don’t actually have to have the dog on my lap—Charlotte can be half on my hip and half on the bed. This isn’t an Olympic sport, after all. There are no rules, no mandatory movements or positions,