Jeneration X: One Reluctant Adult's Attempt to Unarrest Her Arrested Development; Or, Why It's Never by Lancaster, Jen (e books free to read .txt) 📕

this show is my nighttime ritual. I’m at the point where it’s not really bedtime until I find out the latest haps in the Ben-Amy-Adrian-Ricky love square. It’s killing me that without power, we don’t have the bandwidth for Netflix to work on my iPad.

That’s why I can’t sleep.

Of course, I don’t admit Fletch is right because he’ll laugh at me.

Ironically, Stacey hasn’t even told her shiny new husband, Bill, that she watches the show because she’s mortified. She waits until he’s out cold and then pulls out her iTouch all silent-like in the middle of the night.

After a fitful night of dozing in half-hour increments, I finally rise for the day. I spend the next three hours fishing foliage out of the pool with a big blue net and hosing a billion fallen leaves off the patio. I don’t get a full idea of how bad the storm was until I notice that one of our forty-foot pine trees is listing at a forty-five-degree angle. The wind pulled it right out of the ground and half its tangled roots are visible at the base. Whoa!

Later, Fletch pries the electric garage door open and goes out to buy ice. We’ve already lost the contents of the fridge, but I’ll be damned if we’re going to waste my stockpiles in the freezer. I’ve spent a year loading up on extra cuts of meat so in case we ever find ourselves in a lean time, we won’t want for protein. I’ve easily stored hundreds of dollars’ worth of rib roasts and steaks and pork loins, well aware of how much better these items taste than hamburger-bun mini-pizzas. Fletch returns home with a cooler the size of a coffin filled with bags of ice and we’re able to save all our frozen goods.

Although we have every resource available from cash and credit and plenty to eat and shelves of books I’ve been saving for just this kind of occasion, I can’t seem to unclench.

I’m furious that for all my worrying, for all the ways that I plotted and schemed to make sure we were never without again, here we are in a situation that’s completely out of my control. In my head I know I’m in my own home with a mortgage that’s paid in the gracious green suburbs, but in my heart, I’m standing by the back window of my shitty rental apartment, watching the repo men wheel away in the car we can no longer afford and waiting for the eviction notice.

Funny how one tiny power outage can bring me back to the very worst time of my life, triggering every fear and insecurity about not being ready.

Fletch, who’s been diligently tucked away in his office all month reconciling our bank statements from 2010, is delighted to have a Mother Nature–induced day off. While he was out, he picked up a chain saw and related protective gear and has been happily hacking away at downed limbs and overgrown brush. To him, this is, like, the best snow day ever!

But for me? I can’t stop fretting about my stupid wavy hair and pacing around in the vicinity of the television. I try to read but nothing holds my interest, likely because I’m up and fooling with the dial on our battery-operated radio every ten minutes trying to get an update on ComEd’s progress. I just need the lights to come back on so I can remember that it’s 2011, and not 2002.

When I go to use my iPhone to order a pizza, I burst into frustrated tears when I find the battery drained because it always gets bumped on in my overcrowded purse. Fletch senses I need some cheering up. He challenges me to a board game, something I always suggest, but rarely get to play. But instead of being thrilled at the opportunity to finally whip his punk ass at Worst Case Scenario, [How does Fletch know so much about shark bites?] I fret and pout through the first two games.

Due to a couple of clever guesses on my part in regard to grizzly attacks, I’m in the lead when, out of nowhere, the room is flooded with light. I spring from my seat, dashing over to the power strip where I charge everything.

“I wouldn’t get so excited,” Fletch says. “They may be working on the line and we’ll probably go out again before we’re back on.”

We have two blissful minutes of illumination and I get to whiz with the lights on for the first time in twenty-four hours, and poof! Just like that, they go out again.

“NOOOOOOOOO!!!” I shout.

“Yeah, figured that would happen. Sit down, it’s your roll,” Fletch says.

We return to our game and I’m energized by having the lights on again, even if it was only momentary. But that’s really all I need to get my head back into the present.

As we play, I’m reminded of my seemingly endless stretch of being unemployed. Although things were pretty bad at the end, it occurs to me that at no point while I was out of work did I ever think to enjoy having the time off. I never once gave myself the luxury of relaxing. In retrospect, I probably would have gotten a job a lot quicker if I hadn’t gone to my interviews so tightly wound. I’m sure I came off ten times more intense than I actually am.

I’m not saying I’m unhappy with the way things turned out—far from it. I have a career that I love and a life that’s full of joy. But I wonder if I wouldn’t have created a happy ending just a little bit sooner if I’d ever allowed myself to just be, to appreciate the freedom of not being tied to a corporate life that I’d hated, to realize that in a world that’s constantly go-go-go, sometimes it’s nice just to turn everything off and spend a little quality time across the table from the man that I adore… while beating