This Week in Dreamland!

This week, Thursday was completely amazing because Wednesday had sucked so bad.

Wednesday sucked so bad not because, as the culmination of untold incidents of inanity and frustration, I missed the bus, which would’ve sucked, but because the bus missed me. Yes, that’s right. After waiting for nearly 20 minutes in the dark near an interstate overpass homeless camp, I finally see the bus appear on the horizon. As it veers toward the curb, I jauntily step back—on instinct, I guess, given some of our city bus drivers’ proclivities. The bus slows, the driver looks me in the eye, doesn’t open the door, and pulls away. Surreal. So pissed and stupefied am I that I walk the four cathartic miles home, arriving to a worried spouse but feeling refreshed and better than I’ve felt all day.

Tuesday was definitely better than Wednesday, but otherwise dull and overbooked with diaper changes as my son had diarrhea. Coincidentally, Tuesday was also the day I realized I’d come to recognize types of poop the way Eskimos know dozens of types of snow.* There is, of course, brown, yellow, green, and orange poop. There’s stinky poop and toxic stinky poop. Solid poop and loose poop, which is not the same as runny poop or liquid poop. (Like wine or broth, it’s all about consistency.) There’s also corn poop, quinoa poop, lentil curry poop, too many plums and pears/not enough cookies poop. There’s poop that sticks to the diaper when you shake it into the toilet. Poop that falls into the bowl like a stone and splashes you. And there’s poop that reveals the face of childhood superheroes in its smearing. There’s poop that talks in your dreams. There’s also shit.

Monday sucked for many of the same reasons that Wednesday sucked (mostly related to unemployment and the expanding, godless universe), just half as bad. Naturally, as it was Monday, Wednesday hadn’t happened yet, which meant that it seemed fully crappy, which, looking back now, was a shame, as I would’ve enjoyed it more had I known what was waiting for me on Wednesday.

Today, Friday, has been awesome. After breakfast and cartoons, my son and I went for a walk to the lake and threw stones into the water like Andy and Opie. Then we played in the park for an hour and stopped at the bakery for a blueberry tart (him) and a high-test Americano (me.) Now, he’s napping off the sugar rush, and I’m zinging my way through the caffeine while we wait for Mama, whom we’ve barely seen this week, to come home with pizza and while the city waits for a huge storm to blow in after months and months without rain.

That was my week. How was yours?

(*Oh yeah, that whole thing about Eskimos having umpteen words for snow isn’t really the case. Apparently Russians, though, have a bunch of fun words for blue. I wonder if they have blue poop?)

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