1) Your great-aunt and uncle get you a 1,000-piece puzzle for your birthday. “What fresh hell is this?” you think, as you pull it from its dollar store gift bag. But not wanting to hurt their feelings, you give the performance of a lifetime. You raise your eyebrows and widen your eyes, as you roar, “Wow! I’m going to start this bad boy right now!” Two days later, your great-uncle calls to ask about your progress. You exclaim “Going well, I think! Thank you to all. LOVE!!!” then say you have to go because you smell something burning (later identified to be your pants on fire).
2) While five glasses into the pinot, you make the mistake of telling your friends that you’ve been working on a novel during your monthly Zoom check-in. The truth is that you only thought about writing a novel, fleetingly, between episodes of that tedious Home Edit show on Netflix after remembering Reese Witherspoon also has some sort of book club. When your friend sends a group message on WhatsApp to ask you how the writing is going, you reply, “Going well, I think! Thank you to all. LOVE!!!” hoping to deflect enough that the conversation will go back to school re-openings.
3) You stress eat a bunch of croissants (because 2020) and your digestive system is paying dearly for it. Naturally, your bathroom visit is therefore taking commensurately longer than usual. Even though his bathroom visits are consistently three times longer than yours, one of your roommates somehow sees fit to knock on the door and ask you how it’s going in there. You grit your teeth, plant your feet and yell back, struggling to keep the strain and panic from your voice, “Going well, I think! Thank you to all. LOVE!!!” Your voice rises three octaves at the end, but it’s enough to get rid of him, even if he does mutter “What the fuck?” as he ambles away.
4) You commit to building a tree fort in the backyard even though you have no real carpentry skills because the kids are bored being at home so much. You figure, how hard can it be to nail a few boards together? Your wife has taken the kids on a bike ride so you can focus on the task at hand and the thrill of being alone is exhilarating. You pop a brew to celebrate. Two hours later, she texts you: “The kids are so excited. How’s it going?” Panicked, you text back “Going well, I think! Thank you to all. LOVE!!!” She texts back: “Okay, captain exclamation mark, don’t worry, I got this” and you breathe a sigh of hoppy relief.
5) A rando who somehow ended up in your Twitter feed (how?!!) writes that only women use emojis and exclamation marks. You bide your time. Suddenly, in a year of unrelenting shit, a small gift comes your way. The president tweets: “Going well, I think! Thank you to all. LOVE!!!” It would have been even better if he’d put the heart emoji at the end, but hey, you can’t have everything. Heart racing, you screengrab it and reply to the rando’s old tweet, as you think, triumphantly: “Suck it, Chad!!!!! :P”
