A dramatic telling of my hump day

Some days I create a self-fulfilling prophecy of doom for myself, and yesterday was one of those days. You know what days I’m talking about. The ones where you decide from the second you wake up late and it’s raining outside that it’s going to be a bad day and then you feign surprise when everything goes wrong the whole day through. I’m convinced this is why everyone hates Mondays. Sure, it marks the official end of the weekend, but really it’s just another day. The only difference is somewhere along the lines we decided that it’s a no-good, awful, hated day, so it has no choice but to live up to it. 

So yesterday I suppose I subconsciously decided it was going to be a bad day even though it was hump day. It’s been overcast all week and I just felt the clouds pressing on me. I hopped in the car to drive to work and remembered that I had put off getting gas the day before because I’m a lazy mofo, but of course I had left five minutes later than I should’ve to get there right on time. No time for silly gas breaks! Then my gas light came on, but no big deal, it was just a few miles. I made it there and promptly forgot about the gas situation, but I still felt down. Finally I decided going for a walk was the best decision so I packed up the dude baby (I call my nanny baby “dude baby,” so let that be known) and headed across the street for some sushi: happiness in raw fish form. I sat outside and the dude baby didn’t even cry when he woke up and watched me chomp down on a dragon roll. It was entirely pleasant. Things were looking up.

I jumped back into my car to head home for the day already mentally struggling with whether I should watch Netflix all night or try to work out when I remembered the gas light and could no longer ignore it. I started in the direction of home with my eyes peeled for a gas station but there were none to be found. I was not about to get on the freeway without getting gas, so I kept driving hoping one would pop up but there were none. It made zero sense and my phone was dead from playing Pandora lullabies all day, so I pressed the fuel button on my clunky GPS that likes to fly off the dashboard every time I make a turn. It found one about a half a mile away in the opposite direction I was headed, so as a person who has never actually run out of gas before, my panic-stricken self made a reckless U-turn and finally found the Shell station after battling after work commute traffic. I pulled up to an out-of-order pump and sighed one of those self-indulgent-OF-COURSE-this-would-happen-to-me sighs and pulled up to another one. That’s when I realized I left my wallet in the baby bag.

By this time my phone had charged up to about 5 percent on my car charger (thank buddha for technology) so naturally I called my sister crying. I searched my car for a spare five dollar bill or something and instead found an exploded bottle of sunscreen in my center console. I decided to be a billy badass and drive back to the house to get my wallet instead of calling for help. I turned the AC off and I even turned the radio all the way down because according to my brain, extra noise burns much-needed gas. I cursed every other car on the road and made it safely to the house where no one was home. Luckily I had a key, but the real luck came when I found that the baby bag was right where I left it, so I grabbed my wallet and literally ran back to my car. I mapped out several routes to gas stations on my barely alive phone and headed toward the closest one: 0.6 miles away. There were about four different red left turn lights and my phone even wanted me to go an extra half mile out of the way to avoid doing an illegal U-turn but I said eff that noise, convinced that my car was bound to stop running at any second. But finally, after an agonizingly long red light, I made it to a pump safely, filled it up all the way and returned to my sour but less manic mood.

When I got home I thought about what had just happened and realized it could summed up like this: I almost ran out of gas, but then I didn’t. 

The moral of the story? If your gas light comes on and you forget your wallet, it’s probably just because you decided you were going to have a bad day. Also, just turn your radio down. It’ll conserve gas. 

The end.