I’m about two weeks in to my four month homeowner experiment and this doesn’t have much to do with owning a home, and more about proximity, but I’m finding that one of the things I miss the most about my apartment is my walks to and home from work. I’m (probably much like you) quite good at walking without thinking about it, so I could just let my mind get all ‘first year after college’ and go wander off in any direction it felt like. There were no RSS feeds and no menswear blogs to bother me.

It was just me and my unfocused mind, and unless it is summer time and I’m running outside a lot, it was the only time during the day where I had that sense of mental freedom. It felt good, and I miss it.

And then the Uncharted theme song comes on and everything feels like it’s going to be ok. You’ll play video games in your apartment and eat secret turkey sandwiches that nobody knows about because you tell the world you are a vegetarian. You’ll download Horrible Bosses from a torrent site and watch it as an excuse to eat candy even though you can barely hear the dialogue. You’ll lie on the floor and do twenty pushups in an effort to balance the king sized bag of candy you just ate.

And then you fire up your Playstation and press the button with the Playstation logo on your silver Playstation controller and then the Uncharted theme song comes on and everything feels like it’s going to be ok.

At some point we will all drop our iPhones and shatter the glass on the back. For some people it will be during the first week of ownership. Those people will be upset and feel that they’ve been ripped off by Apple. In a twist of irony, they’ll curse the ghost of Steve Jobs.

For other’s they won’t break their glass until the precise midpoint between when the current iPhone was released and when the new iPhone will be released. They will be literally paralyzed with indecision about whether they should wait for the next model or buy another of the previous model.

For a select few, they’ll drop their phone several times, often on very hard and rough surfaces, without incident. They’ll begin to feel invincible, they’ll start to remember how their bones felt when they were fifteen years old. Finally, one drop will prove to be too much and the glass back will break. Disillusioned by their newfound and very sobering sense of vulnerability, they will dig too deep into their own psyche and have an existential breakdown. The last coherent thought they will have is about how they wished they had not upgraded from the iPhone 3GS.

I often wonder how often people think about my shoes. Probably never, but maybe once in awhile when the rest of my appearance is so put together that a person’s gaze makes it all the way past my lazy eye and crooked nose, over my rumpled shirt and unbuttoned fly, by my bulging stomach and the mustard stain on my bulge-free crotch to make it down to my shoes which are either glorious or kind of worn out depending on how you feel about about men with all of the other attributes in this sentence.

He worried about his career and his future and if he would ever fall in love with a woman enough to want to marry her. He worried about his mother when she was sick and his brother when he got fired. He worried about who would be the next president of the United States and how it would change the economy.

But most of all he worried: what if that last tweet was the best thing he would ever write? Nobody retweeted it. Nobody even favstarred it.

How to be 26 years old:

1. Act responsibly sometimes.

2. Act irresponsibly sometimes.

3. Feel very anxious about things you did when you were acting irresponsibly.

4. Notice your eyesight getting worse and your achilles tendons aching.

5. Keep playing video games.

I have this email in my inbox that refuses to be marked as read. I’ve read it probably five times at this point. In fact, it’s not even a message to me, but a tentative acceptance of a meeting I’m holding this afternoon. No matter what I do, I can’t seem to mark it as read. I’m worried about this means, both for my present and for my future. What if having a red ‘1’ badge on my Outlook icon in my Mac OS dock distracts me all day today? Every time I start to get any work done, I’ll mouse down to the dock and try to read that email. Over the course of a day I’ll do this literally one thousand times. I’ll spend my whole workday being distracted by this one unread email. Then I’ll have to account for my hours and that’s when the real trouble starts. Somebody is going to be unhappy if I bill my time spent attempting to read this email to a project.

Now, here’s where things really start to go bad for me. This is going to go on all week, and then for many weeks henceforth. At some point I’ll have a project deliverable due and it will be clear I haven’t done anything other than attempt to mark this email as read for several weeks. “Where’s my tagline?” a creative director will ask. “Unread? More like unDREAD,” I’ll say, before explaining that that is a tagline for a spooky email program that doesn’t let you mark emails as read (or perhaps a special shampoo that lets you turn your white guy dreadlocks back into normal white guy hair). I’ll suggest we should create this and sell it. It’ll be a hit! And I’ll punctuate the whole thing with “Spooktacular!” And then I will be fired.

I went to Storybook Lane at Alpenrose Dairy with my mom for her birthday yesterday. There was a pot bellied pig kind of curled up in a pile of hay. I asked the volunteer lady if I could pet him. “No,” she said, “He’s kind of sick. One of the volunteers from yesterday fed him some chocolate chip cookies.” I was disappointed and also felt sad for the pig.