This morning I was debating if I should leave the house to run my errands (that I put off yesterday because I was too lazy to leave the house) or if I should peruse the headlines on the Yahoo instead.
The Yahoo won. Especially when I saw that there’s white smoke at the Vatican. We have a new Pope, y’all and I’m pretty sure it isn’t DJT. If he was elected Pope, we’d know before the smoke showed up. He can’t keep a secret. He’d blab that shit on Truth Social before the votes are even done being counted. “I thought the election was going to be rigged, but instead I won. Bigly!”
Side note: Please let it be Pope Pizzaballa because how fun is that to say?!
There’d be red, white, and blue fireworks over the White House and the Vatican. Kid Rock would come out on the roof of the White House with an enormous American flag and an even bigger cross. He’d do some awful singing about God, America, guns, and babies and then end with, “The People have spoken! The Presidential Pope has a new mandate to make the Vatican the 51st state!”
Yahoo also wanted to let me know that there’s a lot of sports ball stuff going on right now. Like I could give a fuck. Come on, Yahoo, you need to do better with your algorithm. You don’t even have the right horoscope showing up for me. Do you really think I look like a Libra?
A lot of celebrities dressed up for the Met Gala over the weekend. Some of them nailed the theme and others failed miserably. I can’t get over how every year this gala looks more and more like the Capitol from The Hunger Games.
Speaking of The Hunger Games, Adolpha bought me the newest book in the series yesterday as an early Mother’s Day present. We are heading to Seattle this weekend, so I’ll have a new read for the plane. Yahoo!
But just as I was growing weary of the endless stream of Amazon ads and Buzzfeed quizzes intermingled with news about the ocean warming, microplastics are everywhere, and oh yeah, the administration is still being run by a bunch of beady-eyed hobgoblins who are robbing us all blind, I saw an alarming headline.
It was from a section of the website I didn’t even realized existed. It was the AI chatbot that you can talk to about all your pressing needs. Like, “How do I start a revolution when I have a full-time job and a mortgage?” or “How many cookies is too many cookies for a depressed person to consume?” or “Why does my dog’s poop like this?”
The Yahoo AI chatbot is helpful because it has an auto-prompt ready to go. All you have to do is hit the button and it will answer the pressing question they’ve served up. I would like to think this chatbot has the same auto-prompt question for everyone, but I can’t be sure. The question it gave me was so hyper-specific, I feel like not only is the AI chatbot spying on me through the usual suspects: my phone, my smart TV, my Nest, and my neighbor’s Ring doorbell. I’m beginning to wonder if AI is INSIDE me. Can it read my mind?
I ask all of this because the auto-prompt from the AI chatbot was: “How do I declutter my living room?”
Now, you might think that’s a fairly benign question, but YOU GUYS. I could see it being benign if it asked, “How do I declutter my house?” That makes sense. It’s spring, lots of people are decluttering. They’re getting rid of shit. They’re deep-cleaning. Etc., etc., etc.
BUT the fact that it said LIVING ROOM is the part that is sending me over the edge. Do you know what is in my living room right this second? I’m almost embarrassed to tell you.
I said, ALMOST.
Here’s what’s in my living room as we speak:
A full-size mattress. We ordered Adolpha a new mattress and she’s like the princess and the pea. This is the third mattress we have received in 2 months. The other 2 mattresses were returned after several nights of fitful sleeping. So when this third mattress arrived, the Hubs refused to help us carry it all the way upstairs to her bedroom. He was like, “Try it here. And if you want to keep it, THEN we’ll move it upstairs.” The mattress is too heavy for me to move by myself and Adolpha is way too weak to help me. So, the mattress has been there for a week. And she sleeps there every night.
A ping-pong table. I wish I could say this is a new addition like the mattress, but it is not. The ping-pong table has been there since 2022 when Gomer said he’d hang out with us more if we’d plan ping-pong with him. When your teenage son says he wants to hang out with you, you do whatever it takes. So I bought a ping-pong table and we have no other room large enough to play in. It folds up at least and it sits against a wall, but still. It’s a ping-pong table in my living room. I asked him over Easter if I could put it on Facebook Marketplace since he hasn’t played in over a year. He got his sad face on and convinced me to keep it.
Winter coats. Our coat closet is itty bitty and I have to swap out coats for different seasons. We live in Kansas and the weather is stupid this time of year. It could be 80 degrees or it could snow. A few weeks ago, I fell for “Fool’s Spring” and thought I could move the winter coats down to the basement guest room closet. I had pulled them out and put them on the living room chair to wait for my next trip to the basement, but in the meantime, “Second Winter” showed up and we needed the coats. But did I hang them back up? No. Because they’ll need to go to the basement…any day now.
A TV. We got a new TV for our bedroom and the Hubs put the old one in the living room. On the floor. In front of the sofa. “Why is this here?” I asked. “So you can get rid of it.” Cool, cool, cool. If anyone needs a TV let me know.
Laundry. Not only do we have an itty-bitty coat closet, we have a tiny laundry room. Two people can’t fit in there at the same time. So laundry is always in the living room. There’s a pile of dirty laundry that needs to go in, and there’s a pile of clean laundry that needs to be put away. I feel like laundry haunts my dreams. It never ends. I think when I die, I’ll be buried with a load of laundry.
Tools. The Hubs helped me build a bookshelf last week and now we’re at a stand-off. I feel like the tools are his responsibility to put away. He asked me to get them out for him, and so he should put them away. He feels like it’s my job because he asked me to get them out to build a bookshelf for ME. I feel like the bookshelf is really for work, so it’s more like it’s for US and thus, he should put away the tools. Also, I put away everything else, motherfucker. Put away the tools. This will be fight that will last all summer. I will die on this hill.
So now you see what I’m a little freaked out by the chatbot. I don’t think anyone else’s living room looks like mine right now, so it feels like a personal attack. It feels like AI drones have been peeking in my windows at night or they’re taking over the camera in my laptop so they can see the state of my home.
And if it is a personal attack, fuck you, AI chatbot. You don’t know my life. You don’t have laundry or dogs or husbands who won’t put away tools. You don’t have a kid who swears she can feel the stitching in a mattress and it keeps her up at night. You don’t have a son who knows exactly what you want to hear and says it so you’ll buy him things. If you’re so helpful, why don’t you fold the laundry or build my bookshelf. Making a to-do list for me isn’t that helpful. I know what to do, I just don’t want to do it.
And now I’ve missed my opportunity to run my errands today, so I’ll move them to my to-do list for tomorrow. I think this is a great time for me to curl up on Adolpha’s living room mattress and read my new book!
