The Day from Hell

Posted on March 26th, 2007 by Christine.
Categories: True Story.

Yesterday was one of those days for me.

It actually started out the night before when Christopher and I got into a really big fight. I’m gonna tell this from my angle because Christopher’s more than capable of telling his own. So here’s how the last 24 hours went…

Friday night, I didn’t get to hang out with Christopher. He had to study for a test. That was cool, but I was really looking forward to seeing him Saturday night then. I’d told him I’d make dinner for us on Saturday night after I met up with a friend I hadn’t seen in a while and then went to test drive some new cars (because I had an inkling that mine was about to fall apart soon– this is important for this story and will pay off later). So I’d planned to make him a really nice dinner and then have mind blowing sex for the rest of the night. In my head, this is how this was all going to work out, but all I’d said to Chris was that I was going to make dinner for him.

So Saturday day comes… I meet with my friend, I test drive some cars, and on my way home from the dealership, I call Christopher, but he doesn’t answer. It’s 5:45. I get home and call again. No answer. I have no idea what he’s doing or where he is or what time he’s coming over so I go ahead and make some food for myself and figure I’ll just do dinner another time. I call him again at 6:30. He’s like what time should I come for dinner. Now granted, if I hadn’t called again at 6:30, who knows when he would’ve called me back. So I tell him (not in a pissy way at all) that I already ate. He seems disappointed and says, “I thought you were going to make us dinner.” I tell him that I was, but he didn’t answer my call, so I made the decision to just eat. He wants to know if there are leftovers. I tell him yes. He says he’ll be over at 7 and eat the leftovers. So… the leftovers aren’t really anything Christopher is going to like (we eat very different things and I’d had a vegetarian taco for dinner and he doesn’t eat vegetables), so I decide to go ahead and cook a real dinner for Christopher. At 7 pm, the dinner is ready, but not Christopher. At 7:10 I get a call from him saying he’s going to leave his house in about 10 minutes and be there around 7:30. I’m annoyed at this point because I just went to all this work of making him something and having it ready at 7, but now it’s going to be cold at 7:30. He says he doesn’t care. He’ll eat it cold. Which is not really what you want to hear when you went to the trouble of making something that was really supposed to be a great meal and timed everything to be hot and ready at a certain time. Especially when you’ve already eaten and you’re just doing this for him. But he says he didn’t realize I was going to make food so he didn’t realize he needed to really adhere to that 7pm arrival time he’d given me before. I start to tell him how inconsiderate that is… that he should just pick a time and then stick to it and he hangs up on me– or at least I thought he did. He says my phone dropped him– which it does tend to do at times, but he also hangs up on me a lot when I start telling him that I’m displeased about something. So I try to call him back, and he doesn’t answer which confirms in my mind that he hung up.

He calls later and asks if I still want to see him. Now, it’s almost 8 pm and half of our night is gone, and all my plans to surprise him with the lingerie and all that are out the window and I’m pretty much pissed about getting hung up on and wasting time cooking and all that. So I tell him I don’t want to hang out.

About 15 minutes later I realize that was stupid… I really did want to see him and maybe we can salvage the night even though it didn’t go the way I planned. He then says he doesn’t want to see me and we get into another fight about all kinds of different things– one, ironically, being about how he thinks I don’t put effort into sex the way I used to– which really really pisses me off because I’d had this really great night of dinner and sex planned and he’s the reason it didn’t happen.

We fight/talk/argue/sit and stare at our hands until 4AM. Finally we are both so defeated and tired, we just end it. The next day, he was going to go to the dealership with me to look at the car I want. When he walks out, I have no idea if that’s still on or what… and I just figure I’ll go on my own even though I really wanted his opinion on the car.

Sunday morning comes. I decide I’m going to go to the gym, then go get my car washed so I can trade it in, then I’ll meet up with Christopher for lunch and we can go look at the car. He calls me, asks what time I need him to go to the dealership– so he apparently is still cool with going with me.

Before I walk out the door, I get a phone call from my Dad who tells me he’s in the hospital. Turns out he had a “light heart attack” and although he’s trying to make it sound like it’s nothing– it’s definitely not nothing. And he tells me they’re getting ready to transport him via ambulance to a cardiac unit in a neighboring state for more tests and possibly and angioplasty. He says he’ll call me later.

I sit down and cry for about ten minutes before deciding that maybe it’s the combination of no sleep and my fight with christopher that’s making me cry because my dad is okay and in good hands. Maybe it’s the realization that your parents– despite how close you are to them emotionally or geographically– could be gone at any time and one phone call and change your life. I don’t know. I put it all in the back of my mind and decide to go get the car wash.

I go get a $40 car wash– because it’s an extra $30 for the “Extra Clean Interior” which essentially means they spend more than 2 minutes vacuuming it and actually get all the interior clean (something that used to come with the regular car wash). It takes almost an hour. When I finish, I call Christopher and we decide to meet at a certain restaurant for lunch. He’s been spending the morning researching lease options for the car and wants to share them with me. I feel so relieved that he’s helping me with this because he’s so smart and researches everything.

On my way to the restaurant, my car stalls at an intersection and dies. Does not restart. I put on my hazards and grab the cell phone to call Christopher and tell him I can’t get to the restaurant. He doesn’t answer so I leave a message. Then, despite all the retards lining up behind me and honking their horns because they’re too caught up in their own little worlds to notice that my car has stalled and that my hazards are on, start honking and yelling at me to move. Which makes it really difficult to hear the girl at AAA as I’m trying to tell her what intersection I’m at. People are actually getting out of their cars and starting to walk up to me when I stick my hand out the window and motion for them to go around. I am appalled at how stupid some people are.

As I finish up my call with the AAA girl who says a tow will be there in 25 minutes, a nice guy– a normal guy– gets out of his truck, runs up to my window and asks if I want him to push me to the right lane (because right now I’m sitting in the left turn lane). I tell him yes and he tells me to put the car in neutral. At first it doesn’t go into neutral because there’s no power. Finally I get it into neutral and he tells me to steer hard right while he pushes. There is no power steering and I can’t get the wheel to turn very far. So he runs up and reaches in and yanks the wheel a hard right then runs back and continues to push. He gets me over to the side and tells me to keep my hazards on because I’m still kind of far from the curb. I thank him. Then I thank God that there are actually smart people in the world who realize then can help solve a problem rather than honking and yelling at me.

Chris calls back. I tell him where I am and what happened. He tells me he’s on the way.

Meanwhile a minivan full of Mexican children (8 of them) pull up next to me and point and laugh… apparently at my distress and apparently prompted by their father who was driving. Nice, I think, as I come close to rolling down my window (I would have if they hadn’t been power windows) and saying something nasty. I figure “fuck ‘em” and just hope that when their karma comes back around– I’m no where in the vicinity.

Christopher arrives. He waits with me until the tow guy gets there. I tell him to tow it to Pep Boys by my house so I can walk over and get the car when it’s done. We go to Pep boys in Christopher’s car. The tow gets there. Then the guy tells us they don’t have a tech, so we have to tow to a different Pep boys.

We do. Christopher and I don’t know where the other Pep boys is. We drive around, half lost, until we find it. Pep Boys doesn’t come up on Christopher’s GPS.

I get to Pep Boys. The guy tells me it will be $82 for the diagnostic. I tell him (honestly) that I had a coupon I threw out yesterday that they’d sent me in the mail because I thought I wouldn’t need service on my car (I’d just been to Pep Boys and spent $800 on it in December). I ask the guy if he’ll give me the discount anyway. He says if I go dig the coupon out of the trash. I feel like crying again. Chrisotpher steps up and tells the guy that I’ve had a hard day– my dad had a heart attack and now this– and to cut me some slack. Oh yeah, dad’s in the hospital– I’d sort of blocked that out of my mind– and then I really feel like crying again. The guys says he’ll see what he can do tomorrow– this is after, by the way, he apologizes for letting two people get in line in front of us after we’d been standing there waiting for him to write up the service ticket. Hooray for customer service, right?

We go eat. I’m now starving and it’s almost 2 pm. There’s a wait at the restaurant. Of course there is. We finally get seated. I order an omelete with egg whites only and pancakes with margarine instead of butter (which at the bottom of the menu it says “Substitute egg whites for eggs and margarine for butter at no additional charge!) So I try to, but the waitress tells me they don’t have margarine. I say really? Your menu says you do. She decides to go check on it. In the process she brings Christopher the diet coke he ordered and forgets mine.

She comes back with butter and tells me they don’t have margarine. I am defeated today, so I just eat the butter.

We finish eating. Christopher treats. We go test drive the car. Christopher takes over negotiations with the dealer and I sit there, quiet, so happy that he’s doing this because I don’t have the energy or the negotiation skills he has. He spent the morning doing the research and definitely caught them off guard as he was telling them how much my trade in is worth, etc. We walk out of the dealership leaving it up to them to call me and give me a better price.

He takes me home. I’m still stressed about the fight Chris and I had the night before. I call my dad in the hospital and talk for about an hour. I hang up and call my sister who is very stressed about my dad and decides that despite my dad asked me to have her call him, she doesn’t want to. This stresses me out, but there’s nothing I can do about it.

I call Christopher, wishing he was there, wishing everything felt normal with us again, and yet knowing he spent most of his day not getting his own stuff done because of all my Pep Boy and dealership issues. I’m so tired I just lie on the sofa and stare at the pile of laundry I didn’t have time to get washed. I talk to chris on the phone and tell him that I’m going to go to Blockbuster and rent a comedy I’d wanted to see for a while– thinking it would cheer me up. He asks me how I’m going to get to Blockbuster. I remember I have no car. I sit back down, look up and see…

The biggest spider ever on my wall. It’s super-sized. I am deathly afraid of spiders. Not snakes, not rats, not cockroaches. Only spiders. Chris tells me to hit it with a magazine. I tell him I can’t. He tells me to go get the windex, but when I get close to the spider my heart starts to race and I can’t will my legs to move any closer. I sit on the sofa, gripping the windex, and feel like a complete failure in every aspect of my life. Every thing I’ve been feeling– my failures with Christopher, my exhaustion, the realization that my Dad could have died that morning, the embarrassment of Mexican kids laughing and pointing at my misfortune, the feeling that I don’t even want to call my mom because she’ll want to talk about my Dad, the fact that my sister isn’t willing to deal with my Dad’s situation and there’s nothing I can do about that, the fact I wasted a whole day and accomplished pretty much nothing, and now I’m considering packing up and moving to a different apartment because I don’t know how to get rid of this spider. I think at that moment, I was just too overwhelmed to cry.

Christopher tells me he’s going to come over and kill the spider. I didn’t ask. He just decided he would. He does. The spider dies. Christopher agrees that the spider was pretty big. Christopher leaves. I sit and cry for a little while not even sure why I’m crying. My mom calls. I pretend I haven’t been crying and she doesn’t suspect anything. I get through the conversation with her about my dad. My sister calls and wants my dad’s phone number because she’s decided she’s going to call him after all.

I fall asleep on the sofa, watching “Design on a Dime.” The t.v. wakes me up at 2:30 and I can’t fall back asleep. I think about going for a run, but think maybe I should wait until closer to daylight. I sit there for a few hours thinking and then decide I won’t go for a run after all. I’ll just go to the gym today instead.

I start returning emails. I think about how lucky I am to have Christopher and how I probably will never be the girlfriend he deserves and how lame I am that my boyfriend feels like he needs to come over to kill a spider. I mean, my grandmother who was all of 5′2″ and feeble used to take hoes out to the back yard and chop the heads off of bull snakes on her farm. I freak out at killing a spider with a stream of windex three feet away.

Meisha brings me her toy and wants to play. If I can handle nothing else in my life, at least I can be a good cat mom. I, for the fourth time, double check the list of “safe” cat foods on abc.com to make sure Meisha’s food has not somehow been added to the list of recalled animal foods that were found to have rat poison in them. Her food is not on the list. It doesn’t matter. She sniffs it once and decides not to eat it because it’s the wrong flavor– I inadvertently picked up one she doesn’t like (this month, she only likes turkey and tuna– nothing else). I figure maybe she’ll change her mind so I leave the food down.

I sit down and write this post. Hopefully today will be filled with good news about my car– the old one and the new one– and about my dad’s cardiac tests, and maybe I can figure out how to make things good with Chris again, and get our relationship back on track. Maybe even more good news I wasn’t expecting. We’ll see. Maybe tonight I’ll actually get some real sleep and things will be better by tomorrow. And hopefully tomorrow, I’ll write a funny, entertaining post that will be much more enjoyable to read. God, even the wrap up on this post was pathetic.

I’ll end with a joke I heard so at least reading this post wasn’t a complete waste of your time:

“Just before the funeral services, the undertaker came up to the very elderly widow and asked, “How old was your husband?” “98,” she replied. “Two years older than me.” “So you’re 96,” the undertaker commented. She responded, “Hardly worth going home, is it?”

That one made me smile.

4 comments.

Stupid Marriage »« Slimming Down - 220 lbs to 160 lbs - No Sweat.