Why I'm Never Allowed to Complain About Anything Ever Again

 Yeah, that's a blatant lie, but nice thought, right? Halfway through the morning I was pretty sure this post title was going to be "Surly Thursday - Sorry, I Lied". 

I got glasses when I was seven. My vision is very, very bad. I switched to contact lenses in second year university - first year I mostly wandered around in a nearsighted blur, in a cross between 'the world's ugly' and 'I'm ugly in these glasses'. 

Contacts suck. I mean, they're great. But they suck. I have weird eyes, so it's always a struggle to find contacts that don't rotate and make reality even wonkier than it already is. A couple years ago I started using dailies, which was a real ethical dilemma; it seems so wrong to be throwing out two little contact lenses and two little packages every day. Measure that against the bottles of solution I used to have to buy, and then discard? I don't know, man. 

Anyway. The dailies are quite a bit better for going in easy and staying where they're supposed to, but they're still not perfect. It's quite a production of sticking them in and carefully not blinking until I look up, down, side to side and do an eyeroll or two. Then I blink and hope to hell everything is clear. This morning, it was not. I had to pull them out and re-insert twice, and eventually threw out the left one and started over entirely. 

My back still hurt. My hair was terrible. We'd gotten some snow but the roads were basically fine, and people were still driving like they'd lost their minds. The returned books bin was overflowing and when I tried to pick up a few books off the top, a massive bookslide occurred. This was basically comical at this point - please understand this is all filed under 'annoying but trivial' in my mind.

Then I realized I'd forgotten my lunch. I went onto my group chat with friends who live in Ottawa to join the complaint chorus - everyone is having a shit week. Nicole is absolutely right, I blame the time change, it's a tool of the devil. 

My friend Holly lives close to my Thursday school and offered to bring me lunch. I said I was fine, I would just be even crankier. She told me to shut the fuck up because she was coming with food, so I might as well state my preferences. So I shut up and said thank-you. 

I went down to the office and got my delicious-smelling paper bag and told everyone who asked about my breathtakingly kind and thoughtful friend, and assured them that I cherish her accordingly.

She brought me a cheese pie from Aladdin Bakery, and sliced up my apple (which is the only way I like to eat them, I have a horror of food touching my face), and gave me chocolate milk and a granola bar and a tiny little adorable Biscoff cookie. Basically she made me the best mom lunch ever.

Get yourself a friend like Holly. Seriously.

After that it was like nothing could really go wrong. I read Ninja Red Riding Hood to my grade two class and we were all enchanted. I had the Perfect Library Experience of the elementary school librarian TWICE (a kid asks for a book, I look it up and the computer says we have it and its available, I can see the exact book as I'm approaching the shelf, I sweep it off the shelf with a flourish and place it in the kid's hand and the kid is delighted). A group of boys asked if they could start their Dungeons and Dragons game at recess for after-school games club, and I was extremely wary because having students in at recess went really badly last year. But they were perfectly behaved and thanked me when they left. 

So everyone who wished me a better day today - stellar job, stellar. Overshot a little, even. You don't really ever deserve a friend like Holly. You just try to be adequately grateful.