43. Comic relief

I had one of the worst days in recent memory today.

I won't get into the details, but it was a terrible day on so many levels: emotionally, physically (I'm sick...again), career-wise, work-wise (yup, I consider the two unrelated), etc. One of those days when it seems like the universe is just conspiring against your very existence.

So thankfully, when the tension and stress of the day reached its apex at approximately 6 pm, God did what He so often does in situations like these:

He provided some comic relief; both at my expense, and for my benefit.

(I will warn you in advance; the forthcoming story might be a little too much personal information for some of you. You've been warned...or enticed.)

So I was sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the way out of town to give a presentation for work. The freeway was as slow as I've ever seen it--my iPhone's Google Map was telling me it would take 2 hours to go 18 effing miles. There was no way I was going to make it to the presentation on time, and--since it had already been a terrible, terrible day for me--the stress of knowing I would be late for an important event due to the awful (and unexpectedly slower-than-usual) traffic just made me absolutely livid.

I pulled off the freeway and started taking surface streets, expecting those would be much quicker. Except the surface streets were backed up too. I couldn't win. There was no way I'd get there on time, so now I was on damage control, hoping to make it there not too terribly late.

I had already been driving for two hours, and had polished off a 24 oz. Citrus Stinger from Robek's at the start of the journey. So I was dying to use the bathroom at this point, but knew I had to race to the school and thus didn't have time to stop for a pee-break. I kept soldiering on, traffic still as ridiculous as ever, until I realized that my bladder was about to burst.

So being the stubborn yet resourceful individual that I am, I decided to take care of business then and there. While driving.

I waited 'til I got to a stoplight so that I could focus on one thing at a time. I looked for a receptacle to use; the Robek's cup was the first thing I saw so I grabbed it, removed the lid, and attempted to position myself properly in order to work out the logistics of this rather Sysyphian task. I didn't have much time, and--being a tall guy--didn't have a whole lot of room to work with, so I stayed basically seated, managed to get the two intervening layers of clothing out of the way, and started to position the cup in a way so that gravity would be working with me, not against.

(All of this, mind you, is without any real care or concern for potential onlookers in the vehicles on either side of me. At this point, I needed to do what I needed to do.)

I couldn't get into a good position, though, lest I sit higher up and completely expose myself to my fellow motorists. So I kept toying with the cup, looking for the best angle to place it at, since I couldn't hold it at a perfectly 90º angle.

And just as I figured I'd found a decent-enough angle, I felt it:

A cold glob of the Robek's smoothie that had remained in the bottom of the cup spilled out all over my business.

And then the light turned green.

So I drove with the Citrus Stinger (thankfully not an entirely-accurate name) in my pants for a good minute, until I managed to find a napkin from the backseat, clean myself off, and continue on in the awful traffic.

But pretty much from that moment on, the day got a lot better. I mean, it couldn't have gotten any worse, right? I pulled off the road a few minutes later to use the cup in a more upright position, and then continued on to the event, which, as it turns out, everyone was late in getting to, so I wasn't in trouble at all.

In truth, I think it was just what I needed to relieve the tension of the day: a moment to laugh at myself. 'Cause once a bad day just gets to be that absurd, then it's almost no longer a bad day.

It becomes a bit comical as well.