Bernadette Mayer was a very cool poet who wrote a lot of writing prompts. They are here. I can’t recommend them enough as a way to coax yourself into creative play. I’m in a writing group that my friend Nicole Stanton started where once a month we spend exactly 25 minutes doing one of Mayer’s prompts. Mayer was known for documenting and celebrating the mundane. What the hell is actually mundane though? “Only boring people get bored,” my grandma says.

Last month, the prompt was “Attempt to write about jobs and how they affect the writing of poetry.”

Here is what I wrote:

When I sold mushrooms at the farmer’s market, I met a lot of old people. One of them said, “don’t spend your 20s trying to fix broken men.” Another, who was 99, told me, “enjoy your life.” Another told me that cats know all about quantum physics.

When I was a hostess at a 24-hour diner, I got in trouble for spending unnecessary amounts of time “marrying the ketchups.” It was so satisfying.

When I was a hostess at a hotel steakhouse, my manager asked me to put on some lip gloss and I said I would only if he did first. Later, I had sex with his brother who lied to me about his age and drove a probably-leased yellow Lamborghini.

When I took care of children on the Upper West Side of Manhattan my older West Indian nanny counterparts at the park told me, “look how you dressed all ya clothes with holes! People gonna think that you are po’!” They offered to help me make a budget so I could figure out how to buy new clothes.

When I worked at a state senator’s office, I wrote a letter to constituents on her behalf assuring them “I, too, oppose human consumption of horse meat.”

When I worked at Senator Durbin’s office I read every letter ever written to his office by someone in an immigration detention center. Many mentioned floods of raw sewage.

When I worked for GrowNYC, I left a few hundred dollars worth of EBT chips on the subway and also drove my boss’s car into a wall from a full stop while she was in the passenger seat.

When I worked for the Art Institute of Chicago I watched a woman sit in front of an medieval tryptic restoring it with the precision of a surgeon—she’d been retouching the same painting full time for two years. Later, in a meeting, I stretched and my armpit hair horrified a room of perfectly-dressed curators.

When I worked for MetLife, a man told me how he had been accused of murdering his wife and daughter, imprisoned, and beaten mercilessly. That’s why he didn’t have teeth anymore, he said. He didn’t have teeth. Turned out they weren’t even dead. She’d gotten mad at him and taken the kid to her mom’s house. The bodies found belonged to a different mother and child. That interview was supposed to be about insurance.

When I worked for a world champion race car driver, I talked to homeless teenagers who passionately loved desert plants.

When I worked for a makeup company, I gave an all-day, all-hands workshop with a big bright red period stain on the front of my beige slacks (I don’t know how it went forward instead of back.) I just pretended it wasn’t there. It was fine.

Anyway, jobs make you tired. And it’s hard to write tired. But it was all poetry.