My Trivial Tragedies

It’s been a tragic weekend and this morning isn’t panning out to be much better.

First off, I have $0.13 in my bank account because the ancestry website I was working with are idiots. I signed up for the free two-week trial with the expectation that I would be charged $19.99 a month to continue because, well, because I CLICKED THAT OPTION! My two weeks were up on Thursday of last week and instead of charging my account the expected amount, they charged me $99 for the six month plan instead. What the fuck? And even though I called and had the charge refunded, it will be 3-5 or maybe 5-7 business days (the customer service lady didn’t quite seem to have it all together) until the money shows back up in my account. Goddammnitmotherfucker.

We didn’t starve over the weekend however because even though Grump’s account was down near empty, it allowed him to make a couple of purchases that threw him into the negative (we will have to pay the overdraft fees). We filled the tank of my car all the way and did major grocery shopping because if you’re going to throw your account into the negative, make it worthwhile, right?

So we had everything we needed for a road trip and a picnic on Saturday, which was nice. Although the day started off crappy because Grump decided to pick a fight over nothing (nothing being my pickity grammatical habits) and we squabbled until he had satisfactorily annoyed me (I may have referred to him as Mr. 3^rd-Grade-Math because he had to take the remedial refresher math course when he went back to school and still sort of struggles with fractions, as does, I realize, almost everyone else who isn’t a giant nerd and I do try really hard not to rub my giant nerd-ness in people’s faces until they start pushing my buttons and then it really isn’t my responsibility if a get a bit snarky and condescending, maybe) and then he was fine but I was seething – and feeling a bit guilty for the below-the-belt insult.

Why is this game even a thing? Has anyone else experienced this absurd game? The “I’m going to poke at you until I’ve succeeded in pissing you off and when you react I will call you a bitch and then proceed to move along with my day. Then I will act clueless as to why you are still acting like a bitch even though the fight is over” game. Ridiculous man behavior.

We made up over the making of egg salad and subsequent sandwiches, kind of. I was a bit touchy for a good while after that. We finished packing the picnic and gathered Andro and the puppy (10 month old lab-mix mutt, Bucky, after the Winter Soldier – because when he isn’t acting psycho, he’s just sort of vacant and confused and sweet), picked up the Goth Child, and drove out to a park in the foothills. We had our picnic and a lovely little walk and then *just* as I was getting into the car, something stung me on the ass. Ow! I felt fully justified in whining about that all the way home, much to the delight, I’m sure, of everyone else in the car.

We got home in time to watch the live stream of A Prairie Home Companion on YouTube. I’m a tad obsessed with all things Chris Thile and Punch Brothers and now PHC because I’m a great big progressive-folk-to-post-punk-indie-pop-music-spectrum nerd. (The scope of my nerdnesses is absurd.) When everyone in my office was excitedly compiling their fantasy prediction of sportsing things during March Madness basketball last spring, PHC had just wrapped its first season with Thile as host and I devised the game of guessing who is going to be on the 2017-2018 season. (Predicting sportsings just doesn’t seem fun to me, but I wanted to predict SOMETHING so as not to feel left out, which totally didn’t work in the end.) I picked 20 artists based on a matrix of scoring that included things like new album releases, previous participation in NPR music activities, especially Tiny Desk Concerts, and a few other really nerdy things I’d noticed as patterns from last season. (I think there was one guest last season who had not done Tiny Desk, and I’m guessing he just hasn’t done Tiny Desk *yet*.)

So far out of my list of 20 I’ve gotten two points and we are only a few weeks in to a 26 show season. I’m particularly proud of my call on Dan Auerbach, who is (if you didn’t know) half of the Black Keys and also released a folky solo album in late spring. I KNEW Thile would be a Black Keys fanboy. I mean he DID have Jack White on the first episode of his first season and acted like SUCH a giddy little fanboy and anyone who gets that giddy over Jack White is a White Stripes fan and thus is also going to be into the Black Keys because the Venn diagrams on those fandoms almost completely overlap. Neither The White Stripes nor The Black Keys would really be appropriate acts for PHC, but Jack White doing throwback-to-old-style-country-music things was perfect and solo Auerbach doing folky things is just too good to pass up. Am I right? Of course I’m right. He’s going to be on next week.

Sadly, I have nobody to compare points with because, despite several pleas to my fellow music nerds on my FB feed, nobody else will play this game with me. Tragic, right? If the Regrettes end up on the show, I will have nobody over whom I may triumphantly gloat because nobody else really…..cares. Why must my life be so tragic? (And if you haven’t, check out the Regrettes cover of Fox on the Run on A. V. Undercover on YouTube. It is AMAZING.)

Right before the beginning of the show, I managed to add insult to injury. Or injury to injury. Or something. On my way down to grab the wine – because one MUST have a tasty beverage while watching the YouTube livestream of PHC – I fell down the stairs and bruised my ass in the exact same place where I’d just been stung. The fuck?

And this morning – this morning – I walked my sore, bruised, stung ass all the way across the very large campus of the complex where I work to the cafeteria, because of course the cafeteria has to be as far away as possible, to get a piece of toast (costs 50 cents, which I happen to have on me) because I have half an avocado in my lunchbox and the idea of avocado toast for breakfast seemed lovely. There was no bread and the toaster was turned off and there were no cafeteria staff around to help. And because I have 13 cents in my account, I could not afford to buy something like a muffin or pastry that cost more than the 50 cents I have on me. So now I’m getting close to hangry and that usually gets ugly fast.

I’m telling you. Tragic.