I smirk as I catch the time on the microwave. It’s only 8:20 a.m. I grab Siri’s iPhone and dial my number. She picks up on the third ring.

“Are you kidding me?” Her voice is a raspy grumble on the other end of the line.

“So the regular phone function does work! Amazing! Good morning, dear sister, thanks for all the communication last night! Tell me, how doth you get to New York City from your house?”

“It’s 5:21 a.m.”

“But can you run me through the directions real quick?” I request cheerily.

“Uber. To the train station. Five minutes. Train runs to New York every thirty minutes. Google next time.”

“I don’t use the Google.”

“Then hold down the button and ask Siri.” The line goes dead.

Time to get out of this depressing house. A girl is no one here.

With an assist from Siri’s precious Google, I find my way to the world-famous Central Park. Along the way I tried to strike up conversation with four different people because talking to strangers is one of the great joys of life. Three of them walked away from me, and one acted like they didn’t hear me at all.

Cool, New York. If I wanted to spend time alone with my thoughts, I’d have spent the day in Mara’s empty house.

Central Park is lush with the warm colors of real, live, not-a-movie-set fall. I walk the paths among lovers and business folk for a bit. I try to take a few selfies, but they’re all weird and off-putting because I don’t see myself in them. I see ghost-braid Siri me. Bleh.

I eventually settle in on a bench alongside the path, pull my notebook out of the backpack I found in Siri’s closet, and open to a fresh page. It’s time to start writing this elusive new ten-minute set. Yesterday was absolutely batshit. There’s definitely material there.

I stare at the page and click my pen on and off ten times fast.

I guess first I have to figure out what the issues were with the original set. I’ve only performed the ten-minute version—well, half the ten-minute version—once, and that was at the Laugh Drop leading up to the big bomb, so it’s hard to really gauge the audience reactions accurately. I’ve run the five-minute version at eight other open mic gigs.

The other performances weren’t all bad. Some of them were even decent and got a good amount of laughs. I semi-bombed sometimes, but I always finished the set despite whatever degree of comedic self-annihilation was occurring in the moment. By performance eight, I was feeling pretty confident in my ability to take on ten minutes. LOL.