The Best Crappy Day Ever
I woke up from a night of terrible sleep. I’d tossed and turned half the night. In my tummy there was taking place such a drunken rager of a house party that I was left feeling sorry for houses. There were night sweats and long, weird dreams.
I felt awful in the morning. I managed to get my son to school with bleary, burning eyes and a belly that felt full of hot lead. It was like in The Sims, when you mess up and your Sim becomes too hungry to sleep but too tired to eat. I got done a few obligatory things - the minimum I felt I needed to get done to justify what was sure to be a day of shluffing around. After all, Brian reminded me, it was “our Saturday.”
Sure, since he took a hiatus from working and I opened up a shop where i work from Thursday to Sunday, Monday had become our Saturday. But I like to DO THINGS on the weekends, and it was lunch time and my eyes, guts and joints had already told me they’d had it. What was I to do?
It was 65 degrees outside and the sun was shining a little. I gathered up my phone, headphones, a blanket. I took a few RARE midday puffs - I reserve it for bedtime in all but the direst of circumstances - and headed out to the hammock in our back yard. I was prepared to listen to one true crime podcast, but I didn’t realize that the Dateline episode I’d picked out was going to be a truly heartwarming feel-good tale. As I laid in the hammock under a fuzzy blanket, hood pulled down over my eyes, crying happy tears, I looked around. My wonderful boyfriend was chilling out in a patio chair nearby, listening to his headphones and reading a book. The warm smell of sunshine on fallen leaves and pine needles was rising up through the soft breezes I could feel on my face as that beautiful fresh air went right up my nose. Our cat Misu stalked by like a majestic puma while the kitten intensely hunted leaves in the grass beneath Brian’s chair, and I could hear the chickens chickening about near the coop. I was exactly the right temperature. It was completely wonderful.
Sometimes you just need the right thing to get you to where you meed to be. After my lucky podcast episode ended, I chose one that looked like a nice, procedural legal mystery and dozed here and there for a while til i began to feel chilly. But I felt so much better by this point that I spent the afternoon happily cooking. I made up a batch of oat risotto and a dozen banana nut muffins, dashed off a few household chores with surprising ease, then settled in to play a video game. My son came home and I chilled with him while he did a lesson before we played a video game together.
It was the best crappy day ever.
