Bored to Death

There is a chunk of time every day, between the girl’s bedtime and the boy’s, when I am essentially alone in my house. My husband is upstairs, reading stories to the boy and getting him situated. I have between fifteen and thirty minutes to myself.

A lot of people would use this time productively. Me, I sit downstairs in my easy chair, usually with the dog on my lap, and I watch TV.

Mostly I watch things my husband wouldn’t like. Orange is the New Black. The Gilmore Girls revival. Independent films, broken into awkward chunks. Sometimes I slide into ruts and put Bob’s Burgers on repeat or run through old seasons of Face Off. Sometimes I watch the same few episodes of Futurama more times than flatters me to admit, but I feel like I have to because maybe you’ve been here, too: that place where you’re beyond bored but for whatever reason (exhaustion, depression, Mommy brain, all of the above) you can’t or don’t even want to knock yourself out of it–you’re essentially bored to death.