Oopsie Doodle

Fingernails Across the Moon

October 6, 2026

Recently I got to work and realized I forgot my noise-canceling headphones, the most important thing I have to semi-mitigate the pain of my in-office days. Usually, I’d just suffer through it. That’s what I used to do before the pandemic, when working from home was just a dream. Every day I’d be there with nothing but my weak little $10 earbuds to drown out the sounds.

Now the noises of the office really bother me. Distant conversations, doors opening and closing, constant sniffling. One person eats a bowl of oatmeal every day. And by eats, I mean scrapes it out of the bowl with the force of someone scouring 50 years of baked-on cheese and eggs out of a metal casserole dish with a rusty fork. Full-body chills until it stops.

The noise is so bad that, before I got the noise-canceling headphones, I was forced to leave the office for 15 minutes every morning just to escape the sound. Rivers flowed backwards. The moon turned to blood. Hordes of locusts descended. (Genuinely, it’s wild. Even more insane is that no one else seems to notice.)

Wow, I’m sounding like a real asshole here. I’ve just come to rely on these headphones. When I don’t have them, I feel like I am floating freely through space. Without their pleasant weight on my head and their comforting pressure against my ears, I am without gravity. Not to mention the fact that they do genuinely muffle the oatmeal sounds and help me avoid leaving the room in anguish. Just let me be a drama queen.

Anyway, I had forgotten my headphones. Trying to psych myself up for the eight hours of pain that I knew awaited me, I did about an hour of work. And I watched the clock and listened for the door, hypervigilant to the fact that I’d soon be surrounded by other people and their noises without my handy signal of don’t-bother-me busyness.

But then I remembered that I have free will. So I requested 7 hours of PTO, emailed my Excuses and Apologies™, packed up my stuff, and left.

This is not something that I do. My time off is almost always planned in advance, and it is certainly not taken an hour into the workday. Going home to work was also an option, but something in me called for freedom.

Freedom and just, like, a reprieve from the auditory intrusions that were soon to stab their way into my periphery. There is a real difference in how I feel after work depending on whether I went in. I wasn’t prepared for the after-work headache.

I did the weekly grocery shopping on my way home. Praying to Zurac I can retire one day so that I can grocery shop in peace for at least a few years before I croak.

My cat galloped around the house as I walked in, which assured me that I made the right choice. I made a collage, worked on a spaghetti-themed knitting project, and listened to Built to Spill.

And then I wrote this. Great use of my free will, but at least my cat was happy.

(For the record, my top five BTS songs are as follows (in alphabetical order because why not):

Oops, that’s eight. Real deep-cut picks. Excuses and apologies to you too.)