I really need to get a job. I’m a very much homebody who will go weeks without leaving my apartment if given the opportunity. Yesterday I admitted to Dawg that I had intended to mail a letter since last week but haven’t felt like leaving our home and his response was to smile and say “ya gotta go out.” So I drank all my milk last night to force myself to have to leave the apartment to go to the grocery store to get milk the next day so that I would have some for filming Cereal Wednesday, and presumably allow me to mail my letter. That worked — I went out today.

Some of you know that during the outing I had an incident with a bottle of malt vinegar. It didn’t survive, but I didn’t cut myself cleaning up the shards that spilled all over the driveway of the next door neighbor. I started getting really, really angry. Angry that it was hot. Angry that I had intended to get that malt vinegar many times before and finally got it only to smash it on the ground. Angry that my groceries were so heavy. Angry that I hate leaving my home and this is EXACTLY WHY.

And then I finally got inside and violently shrugged all the grocery bags out of my hands and started putting groceries away, angrily, furious with myself that I STILL hadn’t mailed my letter yet and now THIS happens, and then the Dove ice cream bars wouldn’t sit correctly on top of the Mystic pizza boxes in the freezer and I started getting PISSED and ramming the boxes in… and then the rational part of me showed up and yelled at me, out loud: “Stef, you need to CALM DOWN, this is NOT worth being angry over, and none of this even MATTERS.”

And then I really had to go mail the letter because it’s actually due to be in Connecticut by tomorrow, not that this will even happen, but keeping it in my possession wasn’t going to get it there any faster. So I went back downstairs to mail the letter. And I walked by a burnt out car parked the wrong way on the one way street where our police precinct resides. And I thought that through. This car burned out. Perhaps starting while people were in it. Hopefully not finishing with people in it. The wheels were still fine but the car had fallen down on itself, perhaps because the axle broke or melted or, I dunno, but it wasn’t good, and all the glass was broken, and I could smell the char as I walked by, and I thought, “hmm, I wonder how that car got parked the wrong way and then burned down” and then I mailed my letter. As I walked back through I let my grown-up mind take over and realized the car burned somewhere else, probably in a parking lot or on the side of a road or on a bridge (why do SO MANY cars here catch fire while they’re on a bridge? I don’t know, but it’s true) and then it was extinguished and the car was brought to my neighborhood because someone in my neighborhood owns that car so a tow truck parked it in the one spot it found, and since the tow truck would be travelling with the one-way traffic it put the burned out car, which was loaded onto the tow truck backwards in the first place, right?, onto the street so that an insurance adjuster and a police officer and the owner could evaluate it and the rest of us could wonder under what circumstances that car caught fire.

And suddenly my bad day just doesn’t seem so bad.

Please go read this post, it helps us put our bad stuff into perspective. My favorite line: “Everything is actually only around 8% as terrible as you think it is. Quote me.”