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Bad Days? Fuck That.

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by Jason Roth

I don't believe in "bad days". Well, I believe in them after they happen, but I'm not one of those people who start their day thinking, "This is a bad day." I.e., one or two little annoying things happen to me, like I can't get my goddamn hair the way I want it, or I step in a puddle or whatever, and then pathetically resign myself to the rest of my day consisting of nothing but shit.

What the hell is this, poor man's astrology? Using irrelevant indicators to predict future, and entirely unrelated, circumstances? First of all, these people should stay the hell away from day trading. Let's put it this way: if you step in a puddle and soak your foot all the way up to your ankle, don't assume that your boss is necessarily going to call you a fucking imbecile for your work on yesterday's sales report. He or she may call you a fucking imbecile, but if so, it has nothing to do with the fact that you stepped in a puddle. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that you hand-wrote the entire report in red ink. What are you, a fucking imbecile?

The kind of people who resign themselves to bad days must be the same people who ask you "Is it Friday yet?" in the elevator every Tuesday morning. Imagine one of these people amidst real turmoil. For example, imagine them being kidnapped and tortured by a psychotic serial killer. After the first finger is cut off, do you think they'll say "I'm having a bad day"? Or do you think they've already said that in the back of the killer's van on the way to the abandoned warehouse? Yeah, the "I'm having a bad day" was probably uttered when the killer first grabbed the bitter cynic and threw him or her into the vehicle. Then, on the way to the warehouse, I expect the cynic would have upgraded the "bad day" comment to "Man, I'm having a really bad day." Then, after being rather rudely pushed through the door and thrown onto the musty warehouse floor, I'd assume we'd go to orange alert - something like "Today is almost as bad as last Thursday when I couldn't tease my fucking hair the right way."

I guess the point is: don't let incidents outside your control - shitty weather, what some asshole says to you on the subway, the comics being missing from your daily newspaper, your bad hair day (or the lesser known male-only occurrence, what I like to term "the bad tie day") - don't let these things dictate how you handle the rest of your day's events. One, it means that you're willing to let a goddamn puddle of water control your behavior, and two, your day will be filled with many more things that "happen" to you - rather than things that happen because you've effected them. By believing that the day will be a "bad day", you're believing in and succumbing to non-existent malevolent forces sticking you with imaginary voodoo needles all day long.

And what the hell, let's take a step back. Rather than waiting to see if random bad things will happen to you, or even random good things, why not consciously put yourself in a mental state that you will take effort to make it a good day. A decision to be in this mental state means you are recognizing the necessity for your effort and choices to make it a good day. In other words: that true satisfaction comes from the payoff you get from the actions you initiate yourself. Random bad things won't piss you off too much, and random good things will be accepted like the nice - but not monumental - coincidences that they are. (Wandering through life "optimistically", stacking all your chips on the assumption that you'll one day win the lottery or trip and fall onto the man or woman of your dreams, is the other side of the "bad day" coin. This "cheerful moron" mentality also assumes that the essential events of life happen to you, rather than are caused by you.)

The realistic and positive mindset is one that believes good things can happen - if you exert the effort to make them happen. The byproduct of this mental state is that when a random bad thing happens to you, it won't bother you all that much. Instead, it will be a temporary annoyance. You won't have a desire to fit the square peg of shit into the round hole of your life. I.e., shit happened, so more must be on the way. Something like:

"Where there's smoke, there's fire. Where there's shit, there's ass."

But this reasoning is flawed. The fire might be out, and the ass might be long gone and shitting in a completely different place. Therefore, unless you intend to be some kind of ass sleuth your whole life, I suggest you stop inventing trails of shit to follow.

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