Aesthetics I (fiction)

I had a job once that was so consuming and negative and stressful that it started seeping into my personal life. I had nightmares about it. I would start plotting my strategy, my plan of attack while washing my hair in the shower. The toxicity of it would cling to my clothes and ride home with me on Friday nights and it would assist me in picking a fight with my helpless boyfriend who, at first, spent a lot of time trying to figure out what was happening to me that was making me so increasingly bitter and angry, and then ultimately wanted to be rid of it so he would choose not to be at our apartment when I came home after work.
Most people saw the impact my job was having on me before I did and, finally, when I realized I had to either erect a more definitive barrier between my personal and professional life or I had to find another job, I decided to reclaim my free time. For the rather insignificant sum I was paid this corporation could make me jump through hoops and pull my hair out and place me between rocks and hard places and watch me struggle to get out. I decided that was fine, that they could do this until 5 or 6 o’clock when I shut down my computer, said goodnight to the receptionist or sometimes the cleaning staff, and walked to my car. The drive home, which ranged between thirty and forty minutes was an intermediary time: I could do or say or think whatever I wished to in the comfort of this rather nondescript but good-value-for-the-money car as I sped/crept slowly over the Archman bridge. But when I parked it on Chesterfield or Cumberland or 19th and got out, locking the door behind me it was over. From that instant on it was my life, because it would only be 6 or 7 o’clock and I had decided that, from the time that I turned my key in the door lock and heard the mechanism secure my car with a satisfying clunk, to the time that walked back through the rather anticlimactic entrance to my job, I would enjoy my freedom.
I did not have as much spare time in my life as I would have wanted, so I started to focus more on quality and less on quantity.
Getting out of my car tonight, I noted with some grim dissatisfaction that as the locking mechanism made its heretofore therapeutic clunk, I was still agitated. The day had been a dog and pony show and as much as I tried to reconcile it during the 42 minute drive home, I was still angry and was recalling that Yale psychology experiment about obedience to authority and wondering just how many times I was willing to administer proverbial shocks at the behest of authoritative figures.
I opened the apartment door and was taken aback by the stuffiness of the apartment: we hadn’t left any of the windows open and it was a warm June day. I angrily cranked the windows open and, with displeasure, noted my boyfriend was either not yet home, or had been home and summarily gone out again. I saw also that the laundry basket was overflowing, that we had three messages on our answering machine and, as I pulled the fridge open, that we had nothing for dinner.
I put my shoes back on left. Outside I noticed that the lawn in front of our condo had recently been cut. The lilac tree looked vibrant and one of my neighbours greeted me with a genuine smile as she walked up to the building. Traffic was snarled on 20th but I could hear someone practicing piano quite adeptly in the building next to ours.
I decided to go and place an order at our favourite sushi shop and to stroll the strip and enjoy the good weather, instead of becoming increasing and baselessly enraged in the confines of the apartment, though my mind kept cycling back to the day’s events and rehashing them.
Sake was in order and so I procured a bottle from the liquor store but then became unhappy at the thought of drinking it out of juice glasses or coffee mugs as we would have to do since we didn’t have a sake set. This penchant for specificity had amused coworkers in the past, as one had recently caught me pawing through the water glasses in the cupboard and, to appease her quizzical glance I had lofted the object of my desire and declared "I find it aesthetically pleasing".
She had said "Did you just say that you found it 'aesthetically pleasing?'".
I had nodded, filled it with water and returned to my desk.
The sake set was an extravagant and whimsical request, but I also knew that the spicy tuna roll and the gomae would taste just that much better if we were drinking sake out of tiny cups instead of dishwasher worn juice glasses from IKEA. With twenty minutes to kill before the order was ready for pickup I decided to pop into a thrift store to see if they had anything.