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mom or my dad. If I tell them things they both need to know, such as that they have to go to a meeting or something, they call up the other one and have a fight on the phone. When they get done fighting, my mom cleans and cries or writes harder and my dad watches TV even more and then says he’s sorry for being such a cliché. I just looked that word up and it means typical. I think he might be misunderstanding the definition. Most of the kids I know who have divorced parents get special fun treatment from at least one of their parents. It’s okay though, because I have fun at Woefield. Everyone there is really nice.
    Maybe I’ll put my parent-teacher notice on the fridge at Woefield. Prudence will know what to do.

Seth
    L ately I’ve begun contributing to
The Cure
, this online recovery magazine. My column is called Half Measures. I asked my editor if I could name it Fucking Half Measures, but she said Half Measures was inflammatory enough.
    If you don’t get the joke, then you are not a twelve-stepper. In the interests of killing the thing entirely by over-explaining it, there’s this line in AA’s Big Book that says, “Half measures availed us nothing.”
    Personally, half measures have availed me over three months of continuous sobriety, my own column, and a new life across the street from my mother and her boyfriend, Bobby. If I gave a full measure, I’d probably be running the country right now.
    One thing about my new writing gig: I think I might be in love with my editor, Tamara. She gives good email. The fact is, since I sobered up I’m half in love with every woman I meet.
    I shouldn’t say too much about Tamara right now. My sponsor, Eustace, who is Prudence’s devoted-like-a-dog boyfriend and studly vet about town, said it’s normal for me to get the hots for numerouswomen while I’m in my early recovery, because my health is returning, but he thinks it’s somewhat abnormal for me to get the hots for
every single
woman with whom I come in contact. That sounded dismissive to me and so I added him to the resentment list that I already wrote about in an article for my column.
    We live in an age of repurposing content and I fully embrace that shit.
    Unfortunately for the purposes of what Earl refers to as my ambition to “tomcat around,” I’m trapped here on the farm due to not really receiving much in the way of a salary. At the moment, the farm generates approximately negative twenty thousand dollars a year. As a result of these sad circumstances, I don’t meet many women. Sure, there are women at AA meetings, but Eustace said that I have to maintain a hands-off policy on them until I’ve been clean and sober for a year. That’s probably good advice. For someone else. Yes, I realize that some of the newcomer girls have issues. That’s very attractive to me. There’s one girl who cries every time she shares. She says, “My name is Brittiana, and I’m an alcoholic.” This declaration is followed by precisely five minutes of crying. She gets on some people’s nerves, but I think it’s considerate of her to never go into overtime with her crying.
    Thoughtful as she clearly is, she’s off limits. Eustace is uptight about rules in the program. The guy looks like a Greek god, and I seriously doubt he stayed out of the relationships in his first year, but he said he’d fire me if I got into a relationship, especially with a girl in the program. I figure he doesn’t need to know about my relationships with girls who are
not
in the program, if I should meet one. I’m not being sneaky and dishonest. I’m being discreet.
    It might sound like I’m paranoid and grandiose, thinking people are talking or thinking about me. Well, they are. The entire twelve-stepcommunity is always ass-deep, if you’ll forgive the expression, in each other’s business and I can’t face the thought of getting a new sponsor right now. If necessary, Eustace can fire me next summer. By then I’ll probably be ready