Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Day

9.05 am


I did not wake up with gum in my hair. I did, however, wake up an hour before my alarm went off with the realization that I hadn’t heard my partner’s alarm go off. Which meant that he had about ten minutes to get up and ready for work or he was going to be late. Miraculously, we got him out of the door on time. When I say “we” I really mean “he got himself” because my contribution consisted of sitting at my desk blinking at him and wondering if it was at all possible for me to go back to bed.


I then spent the next forty minutes hitting back or refresh on my web browser trying to get tickets to hear Bill Clinton speak at Berkeley. I had this vague thought that if he did any sort of book signing or meet and greet (remote, but not entirely impossible) I might have been able to say I met both Clintons. Which would be almost as cool as getting to meet Obama.


It was not to be, however, and all I got were a series of messages informing me that the website was at full capacity. I was actually rather impressed by the number of different messages I got – some from Google, some from Drupal, some from Cal itself. (My favorite was “Bad Gateway!” Very bad Gateway! Never do that again!) It was like a #neilfail on an even grander scale.


My obsession with hitting the back button every five minutes to try to get these tickets, combined with the incredibly not-smart idea that this morning was a good time to change out the music on my ipod, resulted in my leaving the house about 2 minutes after I meant to. Which led to me seeing the train sitting at the platform from the traffic light at the BART entrance and realizing there was no way I was going to make the train and therefore running full out toward the station entrance.


Naturally, the train slid away before I was even close, leaving me out of breath and feeling rather foolish.


9.12 am
I also failed to win fountain pen this morning. I failed to even get a mention as having a nice journal or impressive work. The journal I can understand – I’ve definitely gone for function over form. They’re my journals, after all. Who’s going to read them but me. And I can see why a middle-aged man would be unimpressed by the decorating skills of my teenage self.


For a moment I was kind of bummed out over not having been at all recognized. Trying to balance being a law student and still having a creative side is difficult. The technical requirements of legal writing have a tendency to suck out creativity or to ensure that it is expressed in strangely melodramatic ways (Cardoza, I’m looking in your direction). A nod from an established Creative Person would be an affirmation, a hint from the universe that I’ve not been lawyerized yet.


For a moment I allowed myself to feel terribly disappointed. Then I read his picks and discovered that I was not at all impressed with any of them. It wasn’t that it was bad writing; it was that it wasn’t my kind of writing. There are, after all, thousands of ways to tell the exact same story (didn’t someone say once that there are only 100 or so stories in the world?).


9.28 am
I will continue to tell my story. I will tell it in my words, and I will tell it the way I want. I will remember that I write not because I want other people to read my work (although it is always nice to know that what I’m writing resonates with someone) or to make money or even a living (again, it would be nice, but I’m aware of how unrealistic that is) but because I can’t imagine not writing.