It's hard to focus on work two feet away from a horny parrot

I can’t find anything about it in the still-innumerable articles about working from home. “Here’s Why Sacrificing Time Without Pay on Commutes that Pollute the Planet and Line the Pockets of Commercial Real Estate Companies Benefits You, Actually,” sure. “Pomodoro Technique to Compensate for Your Undiagnosed Autism and Unmedicated ADHD Long Enough to Push Burnout to the Weekends and Start Over Monday and Hope it Never Catches Up with You,” check.

“Alcoholism for High-Functioning Corporate Dummies” is always a classic, too, but then again, I could just reset the pop culture clock a bit and finally get into Mad Men.

There isn’t much on maximizing productivity with a juvenile cockatiel next to your desk who spends the day relentlessly rubbing one out on one specific purple perch that already too-strongly resembles the first vibrator my friends and I excavated in the hidden depths of my mom’s closet when we were teenagers.

I’m also not sure rubbing “one” out is accurate here. Farkas does this for hours every day. Is it one extended session? A dozen different ones? Despite breeding them for years now, I know very little about the details of climaxes and refractory periods for the species nymphicus hollandicus. (If you had the thought that the scientific name sounds like “nympho,” you’re not alone. The shoe fits his weird scaly little chicken foot.)

I’m not really alone either as I sit in my office for 40-50 hours a week churning out blogs and case studies and white papers for the company that hired me just over six months ago. I’m a content writer for a marketing team, fully remote, but with plenty of pets to keep me company. In addition to the masturbator extraordinaire, there’s the dogs, the cat, the rats, the living room birds, the betta and nerite snails, and one extremely indifferent elderly bearded dragon. They don’t help with my workload–they add to it, really–but it’s in a way I need if I’m not going to stay so closed up in myself all the time.

I got this job out of a whiplash of progressions too tangled to assign simple values like “good” or “bad” or even “difficult”--just happenings I can only now begin to see out of the haze, with these being the top highlights:

• Getting fired by a company that was itself a dumpster fire

• The threat of even lower levels of poverty than I’ve known most of my life gnawing at my soul’s heels like the chihuahua mix I accidentally-sort-of-on-purpose stole last year

• A sudden surge of healing after sixteen months of needing oxygen full-time to breathe

The last one sounds great, and it mostly is, but there has been no way of knowing, from one day to the next, what my body might decide to do or not do. Some days I could go on hikes bursting with greenery my eyes had been starved for and feel my body flourishing with oxygenated blood reaching muscles long-atrophied. There have been days where I could do an errand and then an event and perhaps even an experience or occurrence back-to-back, where attempting a single one would have me bedridden for days before.

But there have been other things, too. Inexplicable months of fever. Weight gain from the steroids, weight loss from the inability to keep food down, the world’s most ungentle see-saw turning my self-perception into a fun house mirror. Sudden crystallizations of arthritis like an inexperienced welder took the Magic School Bus inside me to practice on my joints. Tachycardia and fatigue and violent impulses towards doctors whose diagnostic plans mainly involve shrugging.

The result is a cocktail of autoimmune and post-COVID flavored chronic illness that has some unseen asshole at the controls of my body pulling alarms at random and giggling at the reaction while I try to push through it all and sit at my desk and type and keep my neurons firing enough to write and strategize and improve.

All to convince my bosses I’m not too sick to keep affording to stay alive.

Keeping Farkas close by in my office helps with the morale on days where I wasn’t sure of anything. Before the sex drive revved up, he was just sweet. Along with my other pets, he keeps me company during the days otherwise alone. He checks in on me with a cute “whatcha doing?” or an off-key whistle of the Addams Family theme song as he shoves his head at the bars to get scritches. He’s my closest coworker, which would be great, if not for how distracting his newfound expression of self-care can be when the rest of us are trying to work.

My actual coworkers exist as human-shaped things (from the torso up, anyway) in small boxes on the single slightly larger box that represents my ability to afford things like parrot sex perches and electricity and my own survival.

Thanks to the background noise settings in Zoom and Teams, they can’t hear the clicking chirps that signal sexual ecstasy in cockatiels. Thanks to a lifetime of masking, they can’t see from my expressions how extraordinarily incongruent I am with things like brand storytelling and keyword optimization and value propositions. This is because I am good at these things, or at least, good enough at content writing and strategy to be worth my other troubles. For now, anyway.

I wonder sometimes if the human shapes on my screen would be as brittle as I feel, with a little pushing. I wonder if they are terrified of losing this job, of being weighed and found wanting. I wonder what happens outside the square of them I see: if they’re as privileged as they seem, if they believe in the work they do and the things they say, if they don’t have to define everything in terms of basic survival.

I loathe that a job holds all this over our heads, but in the reality we're stuck in, we’re all lucky to work where we do. The job pays well. It’s fully remote. Though not perfect, the culture is actually not a complete steaming pile of shit run through with indigestible expectations like a half unraveled tennis ball forced through a dog’s digestive tract.

In other words, it’s something to lose, in a society that defines itself by how much it can take.

I don’t push them for cracks, and they don’t push me beyond professional growth. We maintain the boundary of screen and earbuds and trust each other to meet deadlines and incorporate revisions and optimize, optimize, optimize. We work in marketing, after all. We choose our words and our images and our smiles carefully, and we know better than to question the brand story each of us decides to tell.

As long as we can do the job, and keep doing it well, we don’t need the lore. Whatever their life’s version is of a cockatiel gyrating itself to completion in the background of every bi-weekly marketing meeting and content update, that’s their secret to keep.