My mom reads my newsletter. This might be harder if I were a sex columnist or a shameful right-wing shill homesteader, but she did ask me once why I was dwelling on the jobs I’ve hated my whole life.

“Wasn’t there anything good in it? Don’t you have fun stories?” I do, and I’ve found space to tell those, as well. I had to explain to her that I don’t dwell here in my unhappy memories of years mortgaged to the future; I come to these stories to seek commonality with all my readers. We’ve all had a bad job, because most jobs are bad. We all have funny stories about forklift crashes and sweaty hangovers, about kids climbing into sculptures, which is what happened at my husband’s job at Mass MoCA this week.

I think it is hard for my mom to hear me describe the kind of work I hated most, because it was the kind of work she has always done. It is difficult to tell your parents you love them while you are busily and showily doing everything you can to escape the life they created and become someone they’ve never met. You get to some other shore, and hopefully you send postcards with your new address. You’ll visit, but you don’t ever want to go back.

This year, I lost the best nine to five job I ever had. It was steady, stimulating, and humane. I loved my team and I was getting better at a particular kind of technical skill. In June, the plague of DOGE came for us and cleaned us out. I have been picking up gigs ever since.

The best gig, of course, is writing. It’s what I went to the distant shore of college to do; it’s the stranger I became when I left home.

My mom reads my books. I don’t write in her preferred genres or styles, and I know she doesn’t always like what she finds in them. But she keeps it up, because motherhood is also a shitty job. It’s a job that never ends, that most have no option to quit, and that comes with unexpected tasks that may lie far out of the mother’s experience or training. Now that I’m old enough to understand that, I can receive the work she does with grace and try to make it easy on her as we correspond, from shore to distant shore.

I need a new shitty job. I’ve been on the market for nearly six months and nothing has developed aside from gigs and interviews where it’s revealed that (oopsie!) the position is not actually remote; can you commute to Virginia? I’m on the lookout and if these newsletters have told you anything it should be that I’m adaptable and my standards are low. Feel free to add me on LinkedIn or point me toward and opening you know about.

The job that I still have, that I always have, the job I have always wanted and that no one can stop me from doing, is writing. I wish it were my only job, but this is America. As America turns 250 years old in 2026, I have written her this gift of satire about the myth of the founding fathers, billionaire genetic fuckery, and disillusionment. I hope you’ll preorder it while the 30% discount is still on (anniversary sale until the end of the year) and while it can make a difference to my career.

Next year, (thanks, Mom!) the theme of this newsletter will be love. I am writing a series of odes to things I have loved in my life, mostly humble things that don’t normally get songs sung about them. One of them, my favorite, is about ice water. I hope you’ll stick with me for the less-shitty year to come (as in my newsletter, so in the world, may it be, so mote it be).

Thank you for reading, for writing me back, for sharing this newsletter with people so I can tell more stories. Let’s look forward to something good together.

Love,

Meg