The Heart · Kaitlin Prest

Suburban Paradise | Suburban Where-a-dise?

February 18, 2026·16 min·1 clip

Caitlin tells her dad, 'Now that you work for me, we play first and work later,' twisting his famous childhood saying.

Host Caitlin Prest opens the episode with ambient sound, inviting listeners to identify their surroundings through listening alone, citing Julia Cameron's idea that attention is an act of connection that yields healing. She describes the show's format as radio-inspired, short-form, and segment-oriented, structured around sound, diary writing, and raw audio. The episode is recorded partly at her parents' house in the suburbs of Ottawa and partly at the stone farmhouse of her best friend Becky O'Neill in Roseneath, Ontario, where O'Neill lives with her dog, ducks, cats, and sometimes Caitlin. The diary entry is typed on a blue Royal typewriter borrowed from O'Neill, whose ribbon was very old at the time of writing. The entry opens with the word 'money' repeated twelve times, signaling financial anxiety as a backdrop to the day's events. Caitlin describes her father arriving four minutes early for his first day working for her, and her habit of offering a flexible, sliding-scale start time to anyone she works with. She introduces him to the philosophy of the ta-da list — writing down things already accomplished rather than only tracking what remains to do — and describes his immediate and enthusiastic adoption of the concept. She recounts inverting her father's lifelong saying about work coming before play, telling him that now that he works for her, they play first and work later. The diary entry shifts into a meditation on adulthood as a conditional social status, noting that society threatens to revoke it for emotional vulnerability, financial failure, or moving back in with parents, but not for cruelty or selfishness. Caitlin reflects on having failed, by certain standards, to become and remain an adult, and on the strangeness of being 38 and living with her parents. She credits her father's high-fives, checkmarks, and insistence on drawing progressively larger stars beside each completed task with carrying her through the bureaucratic and emotional difficulties of the day. She uses the metaphor of two-factor authentication to describe their collaboration: he was the username and email address, she was the password. The entry ends with the phrase 'Today, we Dadded,' followed by a postscript acknowledging that calling one's father 'Daddy' at 38 is itself an immediate revocation of adult status. A third segment presents raw audio recorded during the day described in the diary, in which Caitlin and her father are heard celebrating completed tasks with exclamations of 'ta-da' and 'yippee,' and her father narrates the addition of checkmarks and stars. In the credits, Caitlin asks listeners to follow her on Instagram and to donate to the Unemployed Philosophers Guild, a collective she belongs to that funds commercially non-viable art projects. She briefly mentions a person named Natalie in connection with her habit of making puns, directing new listeners to an earlier episode called Sisters. She closes by worrying aloud that she is becoming one of those podcasters who rambles in the credits.

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