8:00 AM: I wake up in my bedroom to an X-rated death-rap rendition of “I Feel Pretty” on my iPhone. Instead of turning off my alarm, groaning, and reluctantly getting out of bed to start the day, I slam my phone across the room and scream “FUCK!” This is heard across the neighborhood and causes several birds in trees to abandon their perches.
8:15 AM: I get ready for my workday. I am dressed in a t-shirt that says “Open Letter To ‘The Man': Eat Shit.” I throw on a pair of work slacks and a blazer, because I’m still a professional.
8:20 AM: I march into the kitchen like the world is my oyster. My mother, a 60-year old Polish immigrant who grew up during Communist rule, has woken up at 6 AM every day of her life since the age of nine, and believes cleanliness is actually godliness, sits at the kitchen island, drinking her coffee. I stare my mother straight in the eyes with the boldness of a rabid mountain goat and say, “What did you put in that coffee, Bogumila? It smells fucking heavenly.”
8:21 AM: Instead of slapping me in the face and crying over the phone to my entire extended family, my mother stares at me for a moment and then pleasantly answers: “French Vanilla Dolce Coffee-Mate. Would you like some?” I tell her: “No, I don’t drink that fruity vanilla dolce bullshit. But thanks for the offer.”
8:25 AM: I am drinking that fruity vanilla dolce bullshit. My mother is always right.
9:00 AM: I set up my laptop for my first work-at-home Zoom call on the dining table. My father, a 60-year old Pakistani immigrant who is the oldest provider of his family of nine siblings, walks into the room. He is on his way to his hotel business, which he has bootstrapped up from nothingness in the manner by which the American Dream taught him he should. He asks me if I want anything from the store on his way back from work at 8 PM tonight. I tell him “Jesus Harold Fucking Christ, Mansoor, that’s a long workday. And yeah, I’d like some Oreos, you lovely, caring, fatherly slut.”
9:01 AM: Instead of sitting me down in front of my open Zoom camera and yelling at me in what would later become a YouTube video entitled “Immigrant father DESTROYS disrespectful daughter on work Zoom meeting” by one of my colleagues, my dad chuckles heartily and says “Okee dokee, see you tonight for Board Game night!”
11:00 AM: I have been working over Zoom. My younger brother, a long-haired, weed-smoking, ethnically-ambiguous-looking musician, traipses into the room. “Good morning, twat,” he says, “where are Bogumila and Mansoor this fine morning?” I tell him they are at work like where his ungrateful ass should be. He moons my Zoom screen and takes off.
11:00 AM-6:00 PM: I work like an immigrant who has stolen somebody’s job and is determined to never give it back. My clients prefer I don’t curse at them like I do at home in front of my very chill, Westernized family, so I wait till I’ve hung up the call before calling Mr. Benson a “sisterfucker.”
8:00 PM: We all have dinner as a family, meticulously arguing over which member of Big Brother has the most prickish face while we pass the samosas. We follow this up with a few throwback episodes of Jackass over a dessert of naleśniki z jabłkami. I tell my parents, “You guys did a bitchin’ job with dinner tonight.” They chortle and hug me. They don’t even force me to do the dishes today, as a reward for my personality and my willingness to “tell it how it is.” Other people’s kids don’t do that like I do.
7:30 PM: We play Settlers of Catan. My mother refuses to learn the rules and thus continuously loses. She curses at us in vigorous Polish. While she stands at the coffee table with her hands flailing in the air, throwing out an intricate stream of “kurwa”s and “pierdolić sié”s, I realize: this woman is why I am who I am today. I beam at her proudly, love exploding my heart. She glares at me, red-faced and pissed off, like I’m an invasive weed and she’s a radish garden. I tell her “You’re a goddamn gem, Bogumila. You’re the cream of the motherfucking crop.” She flips over the Catan board.
8:00 AM: I wake up in my own bed, realizing it was all a dream. I hear my mother call from downstairs, “I’ve made some French vanilla dolce flavored coffee, come down and drink some now!” I respond “Yes ma’am, be right there!”