Yesterday, after waking up in the dark, running out of coffee and forgetting to moisturize, I managed to break my shoe while getting caught in the rain after being unable to find a parking spot within five blocks of my office. I was already limping after stepping barefooted onto one of Ruby’s earrings that she dropped on the living room floor. And I realized that I am just so very done with this week. Yes, the things that are annoying me right now are little things. I fully and gratefully acknowledge that. I know that plenty of people would be thrilled to trade problems with me. I don’t really have any actual problems right now: I have a job, food, electricity, clean water and both health insurance and the blessing of general good health that doesn’t require me to delve into just how comprehensive my health insurance really is. I am lucky. I am #blessed. That said, I still reserve the right to be upset about the following things:
- Daylight saving time. Or the repeal of daylight saving time, whichever this one is. I’m too tired to actually look it up. Whatever you call it, “springing forward” is bullshit. I need absolutely every hour of sleep you can possibly offer me, so losing one of those hours does not please me. Normally, losing the hour of sleep is offset by the joy of an extra hour of sunlight, but there has been exactly zero (0) hours of sunlight this week, so who even cares? It’s gray and bleak and the night-owl toddler has now been staying up past 11, and I am just so very tired. Let’s just pick a time and stick with it.
- Gross shared bathrooms. I don’t mean gas station bathrooms – everyone knows those are nasty and really just a slightly preferable alternative to peeing in an empty Dr Pepper bottle. Gross gas station bathrooms are a fact of modern life and are thus not worth getting upset about. I’m talking about shared bathrooms in a professional setting – bathrooms that you have to use every day that are shared with people you theoretically know and work with, yet somehow these people you exchange pleasantries with every single weekday are disgusting savages who can’t seem to pee inside the toilet bowl! Everyone seems to agree that this is horrifying – “Oh, yeah, sitting down in someone else’s cold pee is just the worst! Why can people not wipe down the seat?!” – and yet it continues to happen.
- The loss of Jimmy Graham to Seattle. I want to preface this by saying that although I am by no means a football expert, I am also not completely ignorant on the subject. I understand, from a point of clear-eyed unemotional reasoning, that this is probably a good thing in terms of the Saints’ future chances at another championship. But Jimmy Graham is a very pretty man who played very pretty football, and I’m bummed that I won’t be able to pull for him anymore.
- Ear infections. My kids only have four tiny ears and yet they are responsible for probably 87 percent of our doctor’s visits. I just don’t understand how humanity has not evolved to something less problematic than teeny tiny ear canals. There has to be a better way.
- Hyphens. Hyphens are the scourge of modern writing. I think it is almost certainly the most abused punctuation mark, closely followed by quotation marks, the apostrophe, and the semicolon, in that order.
