Well, you know what they say: If you don’t have a television, get yourself a meatball. I grabbed what was left of Sunday night’s dinner (take-out foot-long sub).

“What are you looking at?” I sneered at my fridge. It was literally looking at me and I at it, each disgusted by the other. The thing was nasty. In fact, my whole apartment was nasty. I’d just moved in and already my place was a sty. I hadn’t cleaned a thing, hadn’t bothered to take out the trash. Now I was arguing with my kitchen. I really needed human interaction. Sanjay had been with patients all day and Puja in meetings. Unfortunately, James hadn’t gotten home from his first day of work and I didn’t know Kevin well enough for a bitch fest.

“What am I going to do?” I said out loud, madly wagging my finger to nobody. “There’s no way I’m going to finish this memo on time.” I first noticed that I was saying things out loud to myself last Wednesday, when I was in the bathroom at work. “Lilac. My favorite,” I’d muttered to the soap dispenser. Had I just say that out loud? I had. For a minute, it scared me. Was I going crazy? Was I already crazy? But I succumbed to the sink, toilet, and trash can after Laura alerted me to her exit strategy. I surmised that Nelson Mandela had done his fair share of talking to objects while in jail, and he went on to become president of South Africa. Perhaps the private monologues weren’t a sign of insanity but instead a precursor to world leadership.

The phone rang. “Hi, Mom.”

“Sheila. You know what? Your father and I have decided that you really need to have a home telephone. I mean, just imagine if something happened to you and then what would you do? I mean, your cell phone sometimes just rings and rings and we can’t call you at work and—”

“MOM!” I reminded her of who she was.

“Oh, yes, anyway, how was your day? You know, I’m getting really worried. You just don’t sound like yourself.”

“Well, I don’t particularly feel like myself. This hasn’t exactly turned out to be the dream job I thought it would be. And today, the judge told me that I was slow and a bad reader, which really—”

“That woman will rot in hell. You’ve always been the smartest reader in your class. And I still can’t believe she won’t even let you use the phone to call your mother!” Amazing how my mother managed to make the worst part of my job about her.