In the middle of a pandemic, after years of saying how much I hate baking, I bought a KitchenAid mixer. The mixer is stainless steel and cost $300 and sits on my counter, an outlandish reminder of how reckless I’d become during quarantine.

I used the mixer a few times. I baked some cookies — snickerdoodles, sugar cookies, tollhouse, oatmeal — and discovered in the process that baking wasn’t so bad, that the careful measuring and portioning of ingredients was calming and reduced my anxiety. Each time I baked, I felt the guilt of spending all that money melt away. I was making use of the mixer, I was baking!

I told everyone I bought one. I put a picture of my mixer on twitter, on facebook, on instagram. I posted pictures of my batches of cookies. “Look at me,” I cried. “Look at me making valuable use of my quarantine time!” I was more or less trying to convince myself that my time in the house wasn’t a total void, wasn’t months of nothingness, of sitting on the couch watching replays of decades old hockey games. This one thing made me efficient, purposeful. It provided meaning when life seemed to lose all sense of purpose and time.

I have not used the mixer since I went back to the office full time in June. There’s no time. It’s too hot to bake. I’m on a low carb/low sugar diet. More reasons to not bake than to do it. So the mixer sits there and I stare at it and it stares back at me and we have a standoff, one where…