{"id":48,"date":"2005-02-14T18:42:50","date_gmt":"2005-02-14T22:42:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/terrible-horrible-no-good-very-bad-days-et-al"},"modified":"2006-05-01T15:18:23","modified_gmt":"2006-05-01T19:18:23","slug":"terrible-horrible-no-good-very-bad-days-et-al","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/terrible-horrible-no-good-very-bad-days-et-al\/","title":{"rendered":"Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Days (et al.)"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

I’ve been thinking a lot about the best children’s book ever. I don’t know which one that would be.\u00a0 I don’t mean the one with demons and archangels and archaeopteryx <\/span>hanging out in the museum post-twilight, bathing in the fountains and gathering plastic four-leaf clovers<\/span> from the astroturf, though that was very good.\u00a0 Right now I’m thinking about the one with the astonishing string of meaningless, mundane coincedences leading to a Really Bad Day<\/span>.<\/p>\n

Supersimultaneity has always been part of my life. I have mused elsewhere that it is part of the universe in general, but somepeople to whom I mention this insist they’ve never noticed it. In my case, it has been particularly striking over the last many years, dating back at least to a fateful, related conversation with Sarah Ettling<\/span>. Perhaps that’s evidence in favor of it being a matter of perception…<\/p>\n

Sometimes the results are so strange that I hesitate to share them.\u00a0 I’m still taking flack for merely observing the disturbing smiley-face biscuit<\/span> that turned up under my hood the night my battery mysteriously died in the STAR <\/span>market parking lot.\u00a0 A number of people shared that experience, however; and the biscuit itself stayed around for a few weeks.
\nBut I’m feeling more open towards the world these days, and towards humanity, and see only humour <\/span>in those very improbabilities; perhaps you will, too.<\/p>\n

Take the other day, for instance, when I lost three contact lenses and my last pair of glasses. One of my contact lenses had been bothering me, and I had left it out to soak. When I tried to put my contacts in again, it wouldn’t stay in; meanwhile, as I was cleaning its partner, that lens tore along the edge. Its time had definitely come. I had a spare which I had a month previous put away its old case, in solution; but on going to take it out, found it had grown mold<\/span>… three small dark spots. Now there’s<\/span> something I hope never to see again. Was that saline solution or lens solution it was in?
\nNo problem, I thought, I’ll wear glasses. I had had two pairs the week before, one of which had broken the week before. The third and newest pair, ultra-thin, was in perfect shape.\u00a0 But after wearing them for a half hour, as I took them off to lay them down on a dresser, *<\/span>tink<\/span>*<\/span> — one arm sheared away and clattered softly onto the wooden surface, broken not a millimeter from the hinge<\/p>\n

I must have been communicating to my belongings that I wanted to relax <\/span>with my textbooks and forget about going outside today.<\/p>\n

Then there was the day the sink and two electric razors fought with me
\nwhile I was shaving, the cat escaped, and the front door shattered… but that is a story for another time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been thinking a lot about the best children’s book ever. I don’t know which one that would be.\u00a0 I don’t mean the one with demons and archangels and archaeopteryx hanging out in the museum post-twilight, bathing in the fountains and gathering plastic four-leaf clovers from the astroturf, though that was very good.\u00a0 Right now […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":135,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-48","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/48","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/135"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/48\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}