ME: (Tries to work)

MY BRAIN: I know why you’re doing all this, you know.

ME: Excuse me?

MY BRAIN: The 7-day work weeks, the endless hours, the soul-crushing despair. I’ve got it all figured.

ME: You do.

MY BRAIN: Absolutely. This is your do-over life.

ME: My what?

MY BRAIN: You see, you’ve lived this life before. And in your last life you were this spectacular, amazing success. You had everything. And then it spiraled down into a giant pile of ruination, and you said to yourself, “I’m not going to let this happen to me again,” and in your do-over life you’re focusing all your energies on being an anonymous drone. And doing a fine job, I might add.

ME: …

MY BRAIN: It’s the only possible explanation for working as hard as you do to be a tedium-filled, joyless nitwit.

ME: HEY!

MY BRAIN: Well, not completely filled with tedium.

ME: So I was famous in my first life?

MY BRAIN: Oh hell yes.

ME: So what did I do, smarty neurons?

MY BRAIN: You were a writer of course. You wrote this amazing book. You sold millions of copies and were world-famous. You were on Oprah. You went to IHOP with Stephen Colbert.

ME: And what was this book about?

MY BRAIN: Me, of course.

ME: (I walked right into that one, didn’t I.)

MY BRAIN: You wrote a book about my adventures. We actually did fill the ocean with Skittles. We figured out how dead people could access GMail. Everything I wanted to do, you tried. It was like JULIE AND JULIA, only with less cooking, French, and Meryl Streep.

ME: It sounds really interesting except for the giant pile of ruination part.

MY BRAIN: Yeah. You probably shouldn’t have listened to me about being able to fly.