So remember yesterday when I was all like “oooh, I’m a fucking hippie, lets just love each other, all I need in this life is hard work and kindness.” Yeah well that lasted about 12 hours.
I woke up with an itchy eye, not unusual because of my allergies. But then we realized that the dog had an obvious eye infection, and I started to overreact. What if it was pink eye, what if she gave it to me? How much would it cost to fix? I balanced my checkbook yesterday, and we’re down to our last month’s worth of operating expenses. I have shit to do, I can’t postpone all my meetings because the dog gave me pink eye. We’ll lose all our jobs. How will we live? OMG, WE’RE ABOUT TO DIE.
Also, I’d gotten a weird 7 a.m. drama bomb from someone I don’t work for calling out my “management style” on an email that had a cc field about the size of a Midwestern city.
Ben, in his infinite wisdom realized that food and caffeine was probably the answer, so had me take him to Starbucks on my way to drop him at work (his car needs coolant and is out of commission until it gets some). This would have been a great plan, except that Starbucks recently partnered with the only company in the world who can make a pastry more gross than Starbucks’ pastries already were. I got the Ham and Cheese Croissant, which was a really convincing imitation of 6 ounces of dirty, prolapsed asshole. So if you’re trying to go on the wagon…
But seriously, this thing is gross. When a person thinks of a croissant, they think light, fluffy and delicious, a slow dance between air and dough, somehow buttery without being greasy, flaky but not messy. To their credit, a truly good croissant is a work of art the likes of which a Starbucks would never have inside it, unless a truck from a real bakery drove through the wall like a cool-aid man.
I digress.
The thing they handed me was a solid, square loaf of densely packed croissant dough that oozed greasy preservatives like a flop sweat but still managed to be stale. Two full inches away from the edge, toad-in-the-hole style lay a pile of “ham and cheese” that looked, smelled, and tasted like cat vomit. (Please don’t eat cat vomit, I do these things so you don’t have to.) Needless to say, I did not get breakfast. So that’s my goal of eating well completely down the drain.
Then while I was driving I got upset that the dog wouldn’t listen to me and stay in the back seat. She kept trying to squeeze her infected eye into the front seat with us, and I was still completely convinced that she had given me the pink eye and ended my life. So I called her gross and told her to keep her filth in the back seat. I also threatened to break her disgusting neck. You can’t be nice to plague monkeys. That’s how plagues start.
Ben didn’t see it that way. He got upset at me for being mean to our dog. He was right, I’d yelled at her, which I know doesn’t accomplish anything except to confuse her and make training more difficult in the long run. But I was mad. Here I was driving him to his job when he has a perfectly good car that he just hasn’t bought radiator fluid for, then I would be taking our dog to the vet because my “job” of building the business doesn’t count the same as his, and at the same time I was upset about getting publicly chastised by someone who isn’t my boss on a project I’m doing for free. Basically, I’ve been taking care of everybody but me and now I’m upset when they want me to do a five star job on no sleep, no food and no resources when I could have just said no in the first place and side-stepped the mess I know comes from doing too much with too little. So I was mean to our dog because my life is a shit hole and there goes the goal of being nice.
The rest of the day was spent on grocery shopping since we had no food in the house, taking the dog to the vet, and trying to calm my tits. So that’s it for hard work. By which I mean that I did no hard work whatsoever. Panic and hard work are not the same thing. Both are exhausting but only one is fulfilling.
She does have pink eye, by the way. It cost me $175 to fix it, and humans can not get pink eye from dogs. That last bit of information was very important because it made me feel like even more of a tool than I already did. I overreacted about nothing and I’m an asshole who spreads myself too thin and tries to compensate by jettisoning basic human decency. Like that’s ever worked.