So far today has been a crappy day. Isn’t it odd how when your day starts out badly there is an excellent chance that it will get worse? Why is this? Is it because of the way the stars are lined up? Not likely. If that were true then all of those horoscope people would be able to send a mass text message to all Pisces about certain dates that they shouldn’t even get out of bed for.
The true reason can be based on one basic statement that has been around for many years. It was popular in the 80’s along with that smiley face, and it had a short resurgence in 1994 when Forrest Gump hit the big screen. “Shit happens”. But how does that explain having one day out of a good week be filled with bad occurrences? It’s simple. When something bad happens early in the day it affects your attitude. When you have a poor attitude you are more likely to react negatively in certain situations in which you normally would have just “rolled with the punches”. The more negatively you act, the more you will get negative results.
So first thing in the morning you get a text message from your ex girlfriend pretending to be thinking she is sending it to a friend of yours accepting a date from him. Even though you know the part about there actually being a date is true, you also know that there is no point in her going out with a guy she has said negative things about in the past unless she can make sure that you know about it. Everybody has done that thing once or twice where you send the text message to the wrong person and occasionally it happens to be the last person you would want reading it, but it is pretty amazing how often she does this, and it always just happens to be about meeting some dude for a drink, or just about anything else to get your mind thinking about shit that was never even going to cross it unless she put it there. Yes, she knows how to push your buttons and today she has decided that said buttons have not gotten the proper attention they deserve recently.
So now you have a bad attitude. And rightly so, you have been fighting with your emotions for years on how to get over someone that you love, but she knows you well enough to know all of your weaknesses and she also just happens to be evil enough to exploit those weaknesses when she doesn’t get her way.
So now you are driving down the road with one eye on the windshield and the other on the screen of your cell phone so you can send her all of those texts full of empty promises like “you went too far this time, I’m never talking to you again”. That’s when you get a phone call from a number that you don’t recognize and you send it directly to voice mail because “I have way to much on my mind right now to deal with whoever is trying to call me from a phone number that I didn’t deem important enough to program into my phone” and you forget about it as soon as you push ignore so you can get back to driving through five lanes of traffic with your knee while typing “ I never wanted to make out with you because your breath always smelled like egg salad with too much mustard in it”.
Even when you are this mad you always know enough to put the phone in your pocket as soon as the cop turns on his lights. You know that it could be multiple different things that you about to get a ticket for but you also are thinking “doesn’t this asshole have better things to do than mess with people who are taking their kids to school?”
I don’t have to give any examples of how being in a bad mood can affect the outcome of a traffic stop. It’s not like your going to call his mother names or try to out run him, but it is not so easy to be polite to a guy who wants to fine you a few hundred dollars for doing stupid shit that you shouldn’t be doing but you are doing it because you are pissed off over the first bad thing that happened and it ends up being the cause of the second bad thing that YOU did.
Yet you still drive away with a speeding ticket and a passing on the shoulder ticket with a warning about paying attention to the road when driving while you are thinking “why me?”
So you get home from dropping off the kid and you have already decided that the morning has been shot to hell and you just need to eat some breakfast and try to relax for a few to regain your composure. Then you realize that you never checked your phone after the traffic stop and there is going to be about 7 missed text messages on your phone.
But no, you aren’t going to let her make your day any worse so you just erase all of that negative crap without even reading it so you can focus on getting into the proper mood to have a productive day, but then you notice that you have four unheard voice mails and the last one from your mom. It doesn’t matter how bad of a mood you are in, you can’t ignore your mom, so you have to listen to the voicemails knowing at least two of them are going to be your vindictive ex girlfriend explaining why it’s OK for her to sleep around and then rub it in my face so you prepare yourself to erase every voice mail as soon as her voice comes in just so you can listen to the one from your mom.
But your mom didn’t leave you a voice message; she was just calling to say hi and knew that you would see that she called on the caller ID. But guess who left multiple messages. You got it! The psycho hose beast, but she had only left three messages. The other message was from the lady calling to remind you about the very important meeting that you had that morning at 9:30am.
So you are standing there, no shower, paperwork that you gathered for what you thought was tomorrows meeting is “somewhere” in the house, you’re twenty minutes away from the site of the meeting, and the clock on the wall says it is 9:06am. You get a slight feeling of relief when you realize that the clock is four minutes fast which gives you a little more time but optimism is soon going to be replaced with “so it’s just going to be one of those days today I guess”.
You find a shirt in the dirty clothes basket that is cleaner than the one you are wearing and go to the meeting with all the paperwork you need except for the only one that is really important. That one is somewhere back at home but you were so pissed off at this point that you just grabbed what you had when you found the stack and walked out the door without even considering that you may not have all that you need. Then you stand there wondering why you are having such a bad day, “why me?” Or you get that pitiful feeling in your soul that says “when it rains it really pours”.
But that is all bullshit. If you would have been paying attention to the road instead of texting that stupid slut while you were trying to drive you never would have gotten pulled over, and if you would have answered the phone or at least checked your voice mail right away you would have been prepared for the meeting and not gotten turned down by the adoption agency (relax, I’m just kidding. The true nature of the meeting is irrelevant to the story so I opted to not waste my time with the details so mind your own business and worry about your own meetings). But instead of staying on track of all the stuff you need to do to have a productive day you let one bad event turn into several bad events by letting the prior distract you from the latter, and that is why we have bad days.
Sure, there are times when random bad things happen in the same day and they are unrelated, but it doesn’t happen as much as people think. People spend way to much time trying to explain coincidence with fairy tales. A lot of the time it is just you getting a shitty attitude when you have something bad happen and you let it affect the rest of your day.
You don’t really believe that there is something out there deciding how the dice are going to roll for you everyday, do you? I hope not because then what is the point in even trying if the outcome has already been decided.
The best thing to do when life kicks you in the bag is to just take a few minutes to evaluate what happened and think about rational solutions rather than storm through the rest of your day like a bull in a china shop who can’t seem to figure out why all the nice plates keep breaking.
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