Guilt

Sometimes Steven and I communicate via instant messenger while I am at home and he is two blocks away at his satellite office (aka the coffee shop). Yesterday I instant-messengered him in the mid-afternoon to see what he was up to. I'd finished all the work I was going to do for the day (except of course the afterword I am working on for the paperback, which for some reason I have decided I can only work on in the mornings or alternate Tuesdays because it requires so much brain power) so I thought maybe we could take advantage of our few remaining babysitter hours and take a jaunt to visit the new love of our lives.

"Are you busy?" I asked Steven.

"No," he said. "I'm just fucking around."

"Don't you feel guilty?" I asked before I could stop my fingers.

"I feel tired," he replied.

And then we went on to make plans for a trip to the supermarket, whereupon I spent the entire time mulling over why it is that I feel amazingly guilty if I am not working every second that the babysitter is here, while Steven just goes about his day guilt-free. And then, to try to cheer myself up, I bought some organic seaweed and tamari flavored rice cakes. Shockingly, they tasted awful. Who could have guessed?

Then we came home, got Milo and took a field trip to see the really freaky corpse flower at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Milo was unimpressed and spent most of the time playing with his feet and making his new noise: lodle lodle lodle lodle. Guilt-free.