Is it just me, or do you ever find yourself, well, *sublimating* your own… deficiencies, I suppose, into someone else’s triumphs? I’m 78 now, and I’ve seen enough years to know that life rarely turns out how you picture it, especially out here where the options are always three: marry young, move away, or become the town eccentric, and I chose option one, which led to a life that wasn’t exactly… *vibrant*. And I’ve always had this… almost compulsive need for order, you see, a way of feeling like I have some control when everything else feels like a runaway buggy, and that’s a theme that repeats, you’ll find, throughout a life, you just keep circling back to the same coping mechanisms, don’t you? Anyway, a few years ago, my granddaughter, bless her heart, she was visiting from the city, and she showed me these… "vloggers," she called them, these young women with perfect lives and perfectly organized homes, and I thought, “Well, isn’t that just delightful,” and I found myself drawn to this one in particular, a young mother, probably thirty, with a kitchen that looked like it belonged in a magazine, all these neat little bins and matching spice jars, just… *immaculate*. And I started watching her, religiously, you might say, every Tuesday morning, and I’d feel this… almost electric buzz of anticipation, like Christmas morning, but for my soul, if that makes sense, and I’d watch her sort her pantry, and she’d talk about "decanting" and "zones" and "aesthetics," and I’d just feel this… *rush*. And then, I started doing it myself, you see, not in my own kitchen, mind you, because my kitchen is… well, it’s lived-in, and full of forty years of memories and mismatched Tupperware, and frankly, I don’t have the energy for that kind of undertaking anymore, but my pantry, oh, my pantry became my *project*. And I’d buy the same clear containers she had, even drove all the way to the next county for them because our little general store doesn't carry such things, and I’d arrange everything, the lentils in one jar, the pasta in another, all labeled with that neat, elegant script, just like hers, and I’d spend hours on it, my old knees protesting, my back aching, but feeling this… this almost *euphoria* when I was finished. And then, when she’d post a new video, showing off her latest pantry transformation, I’d watch it, and I’d feel this… this deep, quiet sense of… *shared accomplishment*, like we’d done it together, you know? Like her success was somehow mine. And I know it’s a bit absurd, an old woman in a drafty farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, meticulously organizing her dry goods to match a stranger's digital domain, but there’s something in it, isn’t there? This vicarious living, this absorption of another's curated reality, and it brings me a peculiar kind of… contentment, I suppose, a respite from the quiet hum of regret that can sometimes fill these long evenings. And sometimes I wonder, am I the only one who finds such… solace in the perfect, pristine, totally unattainable life of someone else? It’s a bit pathetic, isn’t it? But it’s also… something. And it keeps me going, those Tuesdays.