April 19: Bad Days

Sometimes, you have a bad day or a bad couple of days, but then they get better.

Sometimes you have a bad week and know that a couple more bad weeks are swiftly approaching, and it seems the only plausible solution to your problems is to hide in the bathroom and cry, or sit on the bus and cry, or curl into a ball on the floor and listen to Adele and cry.

Not only is this not the solution, but apparently it makes fellow bus riders uncomfortable.

Let's be real–the last few weeks of school always suck. Every professor assigns two papers and multiple readings, and you have a test in every class on the same day because they probably get together and plan these things out. Then you have finals–the cherry on top of the shitty sundae.

For the next three weeks, I will be running on very little sleep and probably drinking so much coffee that my eyebrows will actually vibrate off my face. This is just a warning that the rest of my BEDA posts will probably be awful at best.

Just so this isn't all depressing, I will leave you with a little something that made me smile today. I used the rest of my Target birthday gift card to get Let's Pretend This Never Happened (A Mostly True Memoir) by Jenny Lawson. It was one of those books that I just randomly picked up, and I'm glad I did because I have laughed more reading the first two chapters than I did the rest of the day combined. Here's a snippet:

I grew up a poor black girl in New York. Except replace "black" with "white," and "New York" with "rural Texas." The "poor" part can stay. I was born in Austin, Texas, which is known for its popular "Keep Austin Weird" campaign, and since I've spent my whole life being pigeonholed as "that weird girl," I ended up fitting in there perfectly and-lived-happily-ever-after. The-end. That is probably what would have been the end of my book if my parents hadn't moved us away from Austin when I was three.

I have pretty much no memory of Austin, but according to my mom we lived in a walk-up apartment near the military base, and late at night I would stand up in my crib, open the curtains, and attempt to wave soldiers on the street up to my room. My father was one of those soldiers at the time, and when my mom told me this story as a teenager I pointed out that perhaps she should have appreciated my getting him off the streets like that. Instead she and my father just moved my crib away from the window, because they were concerned I was "developing an aptitude for that kind of trade." Apparently I was really distraught about this whole arrangement, because the very next week I shoved a broom into the living room furnace, set it on fire, and ran through the apartment screaming and swinging the flaming torch above my head. Allegedly. I have no memory of this at all, but if it did happen I suspect I was probably waving it around like some kinda awesome patriotic, flaming baton. To hear my mother tell it, I was viciously brandishing it at her like she was Frankenstein's monster and I was several angry villagers. My mother refers to this as my first arson episode. I refer to it as a lesson in why rearranging someone else's furniture is dangerous to everyone.

Okay, that was longer than expected, but I laughed so, so hard. If you're having a bad day or a bad couple of days or a bad couple of weeks, I hope this brightened it a bit.

-Maggie