you never know what kind of day someone is having

The way I see it, you have three op­tions when in­ter­act­ing with some­one:

·  You can try to make their day bet­ter,
·  take a neu­tral ap­proach, or
·  you can in­ten­tion­al­ly set out to make it worse.

I prob­a­bly have a rep­u­ta­tion on here for be­ing a com­plain­tive, bitchy, judg­men­tal, eas­i­ly-an­noyed hater, but I like to vent and get over things via self-dep­re­cat­ing hu­mor.

So as far as those three op­tions, I try re­al­ly fuck­ing hard nev­er to do the third one, even if some­one is be­ing a huge ass­hole and kin­da de­serves it.

I had a re­al­ly shit­ty day, and I also had a re­al­ly shit­ty week.

I was halfway home from the gro­cery store be­fore I no­ticed some­thing was stuck un­der my wind­shield wiper.

The rest of the dri­ve home, all I could make out was the word “id­iot.”

The Lacey Fred Mey­er park­ing lot is an un­mit­i­gat­ed dis­as­ter (IYKYK). It re­sem­bles some­thing you would en­counter wan­der­ing through the waste­land in the Fall­out video game se­ries.

And this is be­cause Kroger would rather pay for sev­er­al lo­cal cops to pa­trol the aisles of their store in a lame at­tempt to cur­tail shoplift­ing than spend the mon­ey to re­stripe their park­ing lot.

I know this be­cause not only is it com­mon knowl­edge among the peo­ple who live here, but also be­cause it hap­pened to me re­cent­ly when I went in­side and kept my big win­ter coat on.

They even­tu­al­ly stopped fol­low­ing me af­ter I put a car­ton of 18 eggs in my bas­ket, so I can only as­sume they fig­ured I was rich if I was buy­ing that many eggs and there­fore had no need to steal any­thing.

So I parked close to the door and the spot did seem just a lit­tle more nar­row than usu­al, but there were no signs, no rails, no noth­ing.

I know, I made sure to check.

I’m not some jerk who just parks when­ev­er the fuck they want. When I got out, I looked down at the lines. Oth­er than the bare­ly vis­i­ble stripes sep­a­rat­ing the spots, there was noth­ing. If any­thing ever was there, it was long gone.

So yeah, I must have made a mis­take and parked some­where I shouldn’t have, and I do feel bad about that, es­pe­cial­ly think­ing about how I may have made it hard­er on some­one with mo­bil­i­ty is­sues. I hon­est­ly didn’t know and it looked like a spot.

But some­one clear­ly need­ed to call me a self­ish id­iot to­day in or­der to feel bet­ter about them­selves. And that’s fine.

On the way to the store I took the wrong exit off the free­way.

I think it was be­cause I was fol­low­ing a Sub­ur­ban with a bunch of adorable dog­gos in the back who were pok­ing their good boy noses out the open win­dow to take in all the yum­my sniffs.

Gonna try to hold onto that feel­ing and re­mem­ber those dog­gos.

 

—emi­ly duchaine

Flom­mist Emi­ly Duchaine lives in the Pa­cif­ic North­west. She likes to drink mead, learn about sharks, and lis­ten to the Talk­ing Heads. She pre­tends to be a pro­fes­sion­al busi­ness­woman most days. Copy­right © 2023 Emi­ly Duchaine.

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