Mary Cassatt. The Letter. 1891.

Cassandra hated paying bills. She hated parting with her money, hard-earned selling cute homemade scrapbook stickers in her Etsy shop. But the tedium! That was the worst part.

Get the checkbook. Sort the bills from all the other paper garbage the companies liked to cram in the envelope. (Why couldn’t the same information be on a webpage she’d never look at instead of a dead tree she’d never read?) Record the transaction in the checkbook. FINALLY, write the actual check, being sure to add the company’s long-ass name and her even longer-ass account number.

The worst part was writing her name and address in the return spot on the envelope. She wasn’t sure why it was the worst part—it just was. Sure, she could just buy pre-printed address labels, but that's not what she wanted her cute-cat-head-sticker dollars going toward. No, the companies should preprint that information on the envelope if they wanted her money so bad.

Ugh, and then licking the envelope—would it kill the companies to make envelopes with a sticker seal? Wouldn’t that be the thoughtful thing to do? The companies really wanted to make experience comparable to having wet sand in one's underwear.

The crowning glory: the stamp. Gotta get up and rummage through the junk drawer, looking for one of those. She slapped it on the envelope at a crooked angle, hoping it properly conveyed her resentment.

Once that that misery was over, Cassandra retrieved a fresh piece of sticker paper from the drawer. She drew all her stickers by hand, using top-of-the-line art markers. Today, instead of drawing her usual fare of cute bunnies, suns, and rainbows, she was working on commission: excrement blobs, vomit puddles, and blood drops. It turned her stomach, but it was for a dear, paying friend who’d wanted to create the grossest scrapbook the world had ever seen. And such is life, right? Doing stuff you hate to pay bills you hate. That was just the way it went.