Tuesdays are from Hell or at least one of Hell’s suburbs. I’m not one to cry over spilled milk, frankly, I’m very blessed and have nothing really to complain about, but a very smart woman once told me that we all need to vent sometimes.
It all started with busting my phone. I wake up and I hit snooze about four times, so I’m running a little behind. I typically bring my phone with me in the shower room to use it as a clock to see how much time I have until I have to leave for class. It works, until you drop the phone and it takes a seven foot fall from your outstretched arm to the hard tile floor below.
This kind of thing happens. Charge up the iPad and make it a sub-phone for a couple of days, bite your lip and move on.
After class, I come back to my room and I attempt to print something and my printer suddenly stops mid-job. It’s not out of ink, it’s plugged in on both sides of the equation and it appears that that machine is now dead as well. No power light, just a half-printed underwriting for the radio station sitting in its teeth.
Looking like the day is a little cursed, but whatever, I’m not going to read into it. I’m going to go get my omelet and have a good radio show. Supper is when I knew that is was officially a bad day.
With the omelet, I get a pancake, because when you are given the opportunity to get a pancake, you get a pancake, plus it was National Pancake Day. The omelet was amazing and the pancake was nice and fluffy until three-fourths of the way through and I snapped. Okay, I didn’t snap, but my plastic fork sure did.
It snapped right in half, the head of the fork totally separate from the stem. (I assume there are probably real names for the parts of the fork, but they’re not really that important.) I just sat there for a couple seconds and glared at my decapitated fork and the mostly eaten pancake it was still penetrating.
I look around to see if anyone, preferring an angel or a guy with a fridge full of Mike’s Hard Lemonade, is there to hear my pain, but there’s no one. Like the maple tree my pancake’s syrup is from, I stand alone. But after Tuesday, it felt like I was a maple after a tornado had knocked me down and broken all of my limbs.
You can take my phone and you can take my printer, but take my fork mid-pancake… Well, that’s when I also break.
Here’s to Wednesday and my prayer to just not die.
Collin Kottke: All-Around Swell Guy 