judecorp | Hell's Bellbottoms

I think that

siercia and I were visited by the same Bad Day Fairy, although I admit my day had absolutely nothing to do with knitting socks. It started out so inocuous, though, that's the part I hate: when you wake up in the beginning of a perfectly decent morning and then *wham*. Bad Day.

So yeah, this morning Jen and I woke up on the living room futon. We had gotten the totally goofy idea to sleep downstairs instead of upstairs - I guess it was kind of like camping out or something. So I woke up and Jen was still asleep, and I got my book (well, it's

calledmara's book, but still) and was reading. Then I made breakfast for us (peanut butter and banana for me, toast with butter for her) and it just all went downhill from there.

It started with a minor annoyance on my part (I can't help it, I get grumpy when I don't get any!) that somehow blew up into something way too big and carried on for a long time. Because I was oversensitive after, I took nearly everything said in a phone call from

whirledpeas personally. Then the ugly conversation from earlier came back, and then we went grocery shopping, initially for fruit and orange juice. This turned into $60 worth of groceries. How, I have no idea. Anyway, we leave the grocery store and it is like a blizzard hit. The snow was falling faster than I've seen here in a long time and it was a mess. Joy. So we get all the groceries home and by this point I'm starving, but Jen is cooking so I take some clothes out of the dryer and put new clothes in. I fold clothes. I hear this weird thumping sound coming from the dryer. I open it, rearrange the clothes, and turn it back on. Thump. Thump. I open it again, and find Jennifer's cell phone in the dryer. It is destroyed. Fan-farking-tastic.

I have reached my breaking point by this time, and I slam the cell phone down and scare the crap out of the cats. I say I don't want to talk and I shut the door, which of course brings Jen upstairs to talk. I get irritated. Meanwhile, dinner is downstairs and we are upstairs having a conversation I wasn't really into having, because we spent too much on groceries and now have to buy a cell phone. Eventually we go downstairs and eat cold dinner, and Jen makes cookies.

There are four inches of snow by this point, and I don't want to be trudging through seven inches in the morning, so I go outside to shovel for about the third time this weekend. I'm running out of places to throw it so I give up after clearing out Jen's car, which means my car is still in the snow. Jen finds her old cell phone and we switch the service to the old phone, and Steve calls back because I told him I would go to Vic's, but by now I'm so fed up and cranky that I opt not to leave the house. Now it's 11:24pm and I'm still cranky, and I tried watching Fight Club to make some crankiness go away but instead I'm just reminded that I am not a beautiful and unique snowflake. It's cold in my apartment and there are tons of snow outside and I wasted a practically brand new PCS Vision cell phone and all of the schools are cancelled already but of course I will have to go to work, because somehow my job has "emergency worker" status.

I demand a do-over for me and

siercia.

I look over at my printer, which is not plugged in but holds my personal mail that I need to respond to, and I see a postcard blaring the image "Hell's Bellbottoms" which is of course from my beloved Lucas, of the PEZ Lights. And I read it and think about how wonderfully lighthearted he is, and remember when we were a perfect match, and I wonder what happened to that lighthearted girl I was in college, who ran through other people's sprinklers, wore balloon hats on public buses, got an entire trolley car to sing the Oh-Ay-Oh-Ay chorus of "The Rhythm Is Gonna Get You," and yelled "Mahalaga!" at inappropriate intervals. I found her for a few hours in the back seat of Lucas's Checker, but I think I've lost her again. Sigh.