It has been an exquisitely crappy day.

From more or less the moment I woke up today, when I figured out nearly immediately upon waking up that our wireless connection wasn’t working, I have been thwarted in goddamn near every single thing I have tried to do today.  It’s been the kind of day where I start swearing uncontrollably into my phone and hitting the star key over and over again because Comcast uses a fucking voice recognition computer for their “help” line and there are no options that remotely match what I need. It is the kind of day where I begin one conversation with a customer service agent by telling her in my most polite available tone of voice (which is, despite my best efforts, still not very polite) that I am aware that none of my problems are her fault and I’m going to try and avoid coming off as a complete asshole but that I am this close to losing my shit altogether with her company.  It is the kind of day where I begin another conversation with another customer service agent for a different company by asking her what the main ingredient in tomato soup is, because I am completely exhausted by dealing with non-human-being agents and need her to literally prove that she is flesh and blood before I try and talk to her, and yes, ma’am, I am completely serious, I want the answer to my question please.

It is the kind of day where I take my son to McDonald’s for lunch, my son who is at home with me today because his day care is taking a field trip to a place where his allergies prevent him from going, my son who does not remotely deserve the surly, angry, stressed-out, swearing mess of a father that he has—it is the kind of day where I take my son to McDonald’s and McDonald’s is out of ketchup.  Because of fucking course McDonald’s is out of ketchup, why would lunch be any different from anything else that’s happened today?

It is the kind of day where a former student who I have remained in near-constant touch with for the five years since she left my classroom– a student who I have referred to as “my daughter” in conversation with others before because our actual relationship is a trifle too complicated to explain—the kind of day where that student is having a Very Bad Day, and I find that I simply do not have the mental energy or emotional capacity to help her, and treat her with a coldness she does not deserve or need.

It is the kind of day where I find out that the brightest student I’ve ever had in my classroom, a student I have not kept in constant contact with, who has just graduated from high school, is moving in with his girlfriend and not into a college dorm room because he cannot afford college and has no one in his family to help him navigate through it.

It is a miracle that I’m ending the day by typing this into this Word document on my desktop—because my internet doesn’t work, and my phone is out of data, and I need to stay offline as much as possible so I’m writing it offline—and not ending it in jail.  Because the fact that I made it through the day without assaulting anyone is frankly bordering on miraculous.

It is the kind of day where none of these problems are problems at all, because the monsters who we have allowed to take over our government are drugging children that they have kidnapped and are keeping them in concentration camps.  Concentration camps run by for-profit prison companies, on American soil.

And right now I have no idea how the fuck to cope with any of it at all.