•  stove gas did not turn on. i said ‘i guess we’ll just eat salad.’ zachary asked to see my phone and looked up how to cook a steak in a toaster oven. he read something excitedly, a person talking about the benefits of cooking steak in a toaster oven. the person really had it figured out. it was funny.

•  felt cluttered in the kitchen, thinking about what i would do to help cook. i said ‘do you want me to help around here? i’ve got plenty of other stuff to do.’ zachary said he didn’t need help and i felt good not helping, continuing to unpack. we listened to an urban outfitters sampler, i think, from the early 2000’s. sometimes i’d say ‘what is this, i remember this’ and zachary would sometimes say what it was and if he remembered it.

•  at some point the thing i had hung all my dresses on became unattached from closet and it made a loud noise and i made a noise just as loud at the same time. zachary came over and we were shrugging/grinning. asked him what to do, sort of thinking he would know because of his carpentry stuff, and he said ‘i don’t know, probably call the super,’ looking at the fallen clothes.

•  zachary said he figured out what happened to the cats. i walked to the kitchen. he leaned the stove/oven forward. the cats were huddled together behind the stove/oven in an impossibly tight space. alvie jumped out immediately and shirley tried to squeeze under the oven and her hind legs flattened, then she either got stuck or gave up halfway. zachary said ‘you thought i was going to say a bad thing, like i found out they were dead?’ i couldn’t remember. i said ‘y-eah. that they had died.’

•  watched ‘the office.’ toaster steak was fine. zachary had expressed concern about its wetness and color as it was cooking. he said ‘not bad, right?’ i said it was good. felt happy.

•  they played in a band on ‘the office’…they’re in a band…andy isn’t good, but he thinks he is, but he knows the band isn’t working…then at the end he’s okay because darryl thinks of the words…andy says ‘how are you thinking of that, you just thought of that?!’…they keep going…andy says something about how they’re no longer ‘on the clock’ but they keep going. i like how much everyone appreciates each other on ‘the office.’ i like how much they want friends. michael scott and andy the most. they seem so sweet and alone and full of this desire to love and be loved, like the best people on earth, but they’re not even real. just think of how happy michael scott would be to hear how much people laugh at his jokes. sending a soundbite of everyone who has ever laughed at a michael scott joke to ‘parallel universe michael scott’ who is a real person not played by steve carrell. hearing that would solve ‘the problem’ of michael scott. like he would…lose his personality…or no, he would just talk about how much he loved how much everyone loved him.