The Nap-Time To-Do List That Never Survives Contact With Reality

Here is the plan, written last night with the confidence of a person who has never met this baby.

Fold the laundry that has lived on the armchair since Tuesday. Answer the seventeen texts that start with "no rush but." Get down to Inbox Zero, or realistically Inbox 7,329, which would still be a personal triumph. Shower. Not a symbolic shower where you stand under water thinking about the shower you should be taking — an actual one, with soap, start to finish.

Then the baby naps.

You open the laundry basket and instead sit down "for one second" to eat cold eggs standing over the sink like a raccoon. You open your phone to answer the texts and forty minutes later know everything about a stranger's kitchen renovation. You open the email app, see the number, close the email app. The number was never the problem. You were never going to get to Inbox 7,329. You were barely going to get to Inbox 7,331.

You consider the shower. You hear a sound that might be the monitor and might be your own heartbeat. You do not move. You have become a gargoyle whose only job is guarding a silence.

Eventually the baby wakes, having slept for the exact amount of time it takes to accomplish nothing, and you feel, somehow, accomplished anyway. The laundry is still there. The inbox is still there. You, miraculously, showered in spirit if not in fact.

Tomorrow's list is already written. It's the same list. It will always be the same list. This is either the most honest form of hope or the funniest, and after a year of this, you've stopped trying to tell the difference.

Distilled from New Yorker Humor