Seth Nickell

Its 2:30 pm, I’ve been awake for a little over an hour, and this is turning out to be a very miserable day. Actually, take that back, its an agressively bad day. The context for this, is that I managed to sprain my ankle pretty badly over the weekend. So I figured there are two common sets of “bad things” in daily life: things that are annoying, and things that hurt. Sprained ankles have a way of taking the set of things that are annoying and making them also lie in the set of things that hurt. Trying to fall asleep is one of those things. I’ve been having trouble sleeping because, despite the ankle not hurting much during the day anymore, it always manages to throb at night. So I wake up to get a drink, hobble over to the sink, and then lie awake for another couple hours.

So to start my day, last night I forgot to reset my alarm clock which had been wiped by a power outage. Anyone who knows me knows the results of this: rather than waking up at 10am, I woke up at 1:15pm (and I’m lucky it wasn’t 4pm) and missed an important meeting. I feel totally shitty about this. So I stormed off to the shower (well, limped agressively), and turned it on w/o thinking. It was freezing cold because I forgot to warm it a little first. In my panic, I put more weight than I should have on my hurt ankle, and fell. My head just missed the faucet, but I did manage to hit my head into the wall and felt dazed for a minute or two.

After a hasty shower (which I hate and makes my eyes feel sleepy the rest of the day, but I hold out hope that I won’t entirely miss all the meeting) I go to get tylenol and a drink of water from the kitchen. In the process, I knock over the knife block and it falls to the floor. One of the knives hits handle first with the weight of the block behind it and the blade bends. Fortunately one of the cheaper crappy knives, but I still have enough scotsman in me to be very grumpy about this.

And to add insult to injury, I get stuck behind a dump truck going 20 mph for 2/3 of my commute. Normally I’m very intentional about not getting worked up about this sort of thing, because it doesn’t really matter, but I get really annoyed. This only makes things worse. Of course, its also one of those ratty diesel things, so I’m stuck between sucking down fumes or roasting in the car with the windows shut and only internal ventilation on (no A/C).

So its now 2:41pm. I’ll probably be at work at work until midnight, and head straight to bed. That gives the day 9 more hours to take me down.