In Which Glynnis Decides to Keep Herself Busy

Once there was a pirate named Glynnis Bloodbath the Dread. She grew up believing that strong women lacked knowledge of "womanly" things (it's a running gag in fantasy fiction, after all, that adventurous women can't cook!)

Then she took a much-needed break from Pirate Academy and found herself in an economy where the only pirates left ran corporations or sat in Congress, and nobody needed a freelance buccaneer anymore. And so she fell into a rut of video games, staring into space despondently, and generally feeling badly about herself.

She even put her sword away, to the dismay of her Male Compatriot.

He was very understanding, if not naturally very neat (pirates and their Compatriots generally aren't), and did his best not to mention to Glynnis that she'd been unemployed for several months now, and he had school and work and was doing all the cooking. (The cleaning just didn't get done, but that was no surprise, as neither of them had cleaned much of anything in the year and a half they'd been cohabitating.)

And so life went for several months until one day Glynnis was lounging in bed (she felt she had the right, since she'd had 3 interviews that week, with no results) muttering about everything. "I hate my life. I hate this game. I hate this bed, I hate my pajamas. I hate this room." Well, the last bit was unsurprising.

A Companion Cube is an important part of any pirate slob lair.

No, Glynnis and her Compatriot were not moving in; they'd been living in that room for six months, almost exactly. As she stared resentfully at the room, it slowly occurred to her that, while she could not control the job market, and she could not control feeling upset and down, she could maybe control her environment. And maybe she could make sure that Male Compatriot could concentrate on school and work.

"But then I would be a housewife," she mused aloud, "and that is the one thing I swore that I would avoid at all costs!"

"Really Glynnis," she reproached herself in turn, "This place is disgusting. Probably unsanitary. And you do have a lot of free time. Will you continue to do nothing for a point of pride, when you could keep yourself busy and make your own life better at the same time?"

"Well, when you put it that way..." Glynnis told herself grudgingly.

"But I don't know the first thing about all this stuff. I was always a pirate!"

"Well, now you aren't."

"Where will I begin?" For she had made several half-hearted attempts - New Year's Resolutions, promises to her parents, etc - to 'become a clean person' in the past, and did not have much hope now.

"Begin by doing whatever catches your eye first. And then just keep going," came the answer. Glynnis looked around reproachfully to see who might be using her voice, but it seemed that she had really thought of that on her own.

"Keep a public journal, so you have accountability."

"But what if no one knows?"

"You'll know. Don't interrupt."

"...sorry..."

"Take small steps. Take it slow. Document your experiments. You can do it if you try."

And so she did.