I woke up this morning to the sound of paintball splatters. A local gang had been cornered in my lawn by a rival, covering my house in red and blue. After negotiating a peace treaty, I forgot to eat breakfast.
My commute to work nearly resulted in five fender benders, three fatal collisions and two ostriches through my windshield (all separate incidents, narrowly avoided).
A fist fight broke out between two co-workers over a parking space as I cruised the lot, so I took one of several spots just past their disputed claim. I found out later in the day they were actually fighting over a heated eBay auction, not a parking space.
Shortly before lunch, my cell phone rang and I noticed my home phone in the caller id. Since no one was home except my dogs, I became intrigued enough to answer. Over the line, I heard the dogs howling and a duck quacking. I decided to go check things out and was glad I did because my house sat inches away from catching fire by a sparking power line severed when a yacht fell from a blimp advertising a new yacht-transportation service. There was also a duck in my kitchen.
Needless to say, I didn’t get a chance to eat lunch which left me grumpy for the rest of the day. My grumpiness became apparent to the boss when I inadvertently threatened his family with the plague. That landed me with a week-long data entry project that a high school intern would have been insulted by.
After a few hours of transcribing random letter sequences, the clock struck five and the boss asked if I could work on the project for another hour or so. At this point, someone anonymously emailed me an extremely incriminating photo of the boss with an asian or hispanic looking hermaphrodite. He saw it in my inbox and let me leave for the day, saying he would finish up the project himself.
On the drive home, I witnessed a commercial airliner forced to land on the highway. It was quite a site to behold, though, of course, it did a number on traffic. Eventually, I hopped out and helped to direct traffic around the stranded nuns emerging from the airplane. With a compact car, I could only carry three at a time but eventually got them all safely to their recital, baptism or whatever it was they were screaming at me about.
A few minor incidents later, I returned home and found my wife with her usual stack of evening papers and gossip magazines. She shoved an Us Weekly at me and pointed out an article on celebrity cellulite. Could I believe that Angelina Jolie had let herself go, she asked. Then she told me about the latest crisis in a country I’d never heard of: hundreds dead thanks to a ruthless dictator. The Steelers quarterback embroiled in controversy. The president’s embarrassing faux pas with a Chinese delegate. A new species discovered living in deep sea trenches. Brad Pitt visited a local Krispy Kreme. An entire day’s worth of newsworthy happenings.
I shrugged it off, and she asked about my day instead.
I told her a few of the highlights, knowing she would continue asking until I did. As usual, she overreacted and asked for more and more details. Finally, I told her I didn’t want to talk about it any further.
She asked how I could possibly not talk about it. Crazy things happened to me today, and how could I be so calm?
I responded with my usual philosophy: Ask yourself if will it affect you a year from now. Will it affect you a week from now? Will it even affect you tomorrow morning? If not, don’t worry about it. Forget the small things.
If we forget all those small things, she said, what’s left? Nothing’s left, she said, you’re just numb. She said amazing things happen every day in this world and we need to be aware of everything that’s going on so we can keep our heads above water.
I responded that amazing things do happen every day, and we’d drown just trying to keep up with it all. If you worry about every little thing, how do you cope when something big happens? If I’m numb, I told her, then she’s overwrought.
She blew up at me for calling her names and threatened me with divorce. She stormed into the den, and I heard her crying on the phone with her mother. How could he do this to me, she sobbed.
Unable to find anything worth doing, I went to bed early. My wife eventually hung up the phone and resumed her reading late into the night.
The next day, I walked out to retrieve the paper but found it hopelessly lodged under the landing pad of a small spacecraft.
