I Do Grocery Math in My Sleep

Dear Delyara, I woke up at 3:17 last night thinking about orange juice. Not poetry. Not sex. Not death. Orange juice. The store brand, the sale this week, whether I should skip it because the kids go through it too fast, whether I should buy two because if I wait until Thursday the price might go up again, whether juice is one of those things I can start quietly cutting so no one feels it right away except me. That’s what I mean when I say money has colonized my inner life. It’s not only bills. It’s how deeply every ordinary choice now enters my mind as a problem before it gets to be a preference. I am so tired of living in calculation. So tired of how undignified it feels to think this hard about groceries.