What's on my desk? Scene report from Comcast HQ
Thursday journal, 11/13/25
Scene report from Comcast HQ
1:39 PM. The only one on my entire 80-person floor standing at their desk, I am a lighthouse overlooking the vast blue swell of cubicles and Veja sneakers. Something happened since I got back from maternity leave; everyone stopped standing.
There used to be this domino effect where one person would stand and we’d all follow suit out of shame or boredom or mimetic desire, whatever—trying not to stand too immediately after the last person so as not to appear to be doing it out of shame or boredom or mimetic desire, whatever. To appear as people who stand on their own, self-motivated enough to break the gargoyle hunch and elongate, get the blood flowing. Mechanical buzz of desk motors pestering each other as they rise and lower… lower and rise… the language of the future… a Grimes sample. Alone I stand in Corporate Mountain Pose, counting down the minutes to shavasana.
On my desk:
Laptop, two giant monitors, mouse, headset. My mousepad has a picture of a cat in a cowboy hat riding a horse with sheep grazing in the background. There is a random chihuahua in the lower right corner. I remember buying this mousepad thinking, “I need something that breaks through the sterility of my days here.” I look at it now and see a quirky girl who’s in a bowling league and wears a lot of Nightmare Before Christmas shirts. Not very me, but we’ll hold space for her.
Large black notebook with COMCAST BUSINESS embossed on the front for scribbling to-do lists and meeting notes. Can almost never read my handwriting in here. The same logo runs across the royal blue wall before me, reminding me that we are the b2b arm of the business, the ones expected to bail out the other side as they figure out where they lost the plot on getting people home internet.
Lilac moleskine with a pen sticking out of it. The pen reads “Danville Head Start,” the preschool back home where my nephews went. I did not go to preschool, for which I blame my shitty immune system. Now I wake up and put drops of vitamin D3 (2500 IU) + K2 (as Menaquinone-7 from chickpea) in my water, and swallow a blob of elderberry sea moss. This is my personal journal, and that I have it on my work desk is interesting, perhaps risky. Today I wrote in it: “Worried about my increased scope at work, but trying not to freak out. Trying to, for once, be like water. Trying not to think too hard about writing and the never-ending curiosity around where it is gonna go for me.”