Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Some days it's just not worth chewing through the restraints

Ever notice how no one has a moderately bad day? There are good days, nice days, okay days, boring days, and really, REALLY bad days.

If your day starts out moderately bad, say, you get awoken a couple hours too early by your neighbor's car alarm, then really it can only get worse from there. Likely you'll slip in the shower, trip down your stairs, burn your breakfast, be late to work for trying to make a second breakfast only to under-cook it anyway, get shouted at by your boss for being late, snuffed by the attractive coworker and humiliated in the lunch room. You'll then proceed to get in a fender bender on your way home because you spilled the cold coffee you forgot to drink this morning all over your leather seats, and manage to run over your own dog once you make it into the driveway.

My prescription? If it starts bad, GO BACK TO BED!! Trust me, it's worth the sick day.

Of course that's the pleasant, avoidable type of bad day. There is Another Bad Day. (yeah, those capitals are intentional) A Bad Day so bad that whatever particular day of the week upon which it occurred will forever in your mind only be referred to as "The Day that Must Not be Named".

That day for me would be Tuesday The Day That Must Not Be Named.

This day could start out okay, boring, or even good. But it'll have its blood in the end. You'll see. Instead of being consistently and predictably terrible, it will just have one or two truly horrifying episodes. For a day like this with more than one terrible thing coming together to make the worst day of your life, the episodes will be at or above a 6 on a scale of 1 to 10. Your dog will die, you'll lose your job.

I personally think that the "One hit Wonder" (yeah, I made that up) is the Dark Queen Mother of all Bad Days. That day where everything is fine until one terrible thing happens. It tends to be that your whole day, somehow, without your knowledge, is plotting against you. You're a little tired, picking up a shift you might not have planned to work. Nothing is going wrong, it's an okay day.

Maybe it's not even the worst thing that could happen, but it's just bad enough, and because you're tired, because you're working on the weekend, it just hits you the wrong way, at the wrong time, in the wrong place. From there on out fate will let you make your own day worse. (and don't we always?)

Then again, maybe something terrible happens. Just one terrible thing. You get in a car accident. Your house burns down. A loved one dies. Pick a card, any card. At least on most bad days you get dealt more than just the one card. This kind of Bad Day is like playing high-stakes poker only you end up with just one card, and somebody forgot to take the joker out of the deck.

That's my science of bad days. Never a moderately bad one, and they're always competing with each other for the top spot in our top five worst days ever list. Has your calendar suddenly lost all of its Tuesdays Days That Must Not Be Named?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm sorry. I wish I knew what was wrong, if only to satisfy my burning curiosity. More importantly, I wish I could be there to console and support you.

Meg said...

I think being open to the pain of things is healthy--as long as you don't dwell there all of the time. I know that I have to work with my mind to find the good in those bad days. It requires me to practice and kind of brainwash myself into looking for it.

I hope things get better.