I think I first saw the “no bad days” bumper sticker on a car in Hawaii. I wish I could share the philosophy. Of course, if I lived in Hawaii I probably could. Today, however, in this heartless metropolis I had a bad day. The entire family had a bad day, in fact. My husband was stuck in traffic for four hours, for one.

As for me, the day started normal enough. But then a plan I had went unfulfilled and so I decided to run an errand in the short amount of free time I had. I needed to exchange a pair of running shoes at a department store. This was my second time making the trip. The first time I discovered when I got home that in the box was one white sneaker and one gray. I couldn’t make an even exchange, I was told, because I had paid for the more expensive gray pair, so I had to find the match to the white one. With the assistance of the shoe clerk, I had a matching set, or so I’d thought, until I got home, tried them on, and discovered that although the colors of the shoes were now the same, one was a B, or medium, width and the other, a D, or wide.

So, a week went by until I could go in. And, you guessed it, the other mismatched pair was nowhere to be found. And there were no others of this type in my size, so I came home empty handed. (Somewhere in a neighboring community a woman is thinking to herself, “My, that right shoe is so much tighter than the left!”)

All right. Not the end of the world there. But then I had to gently encourage my son to figure out a schedule of classes for his first semester of college (I lied, I yelled). It was his day to register online, and the classes go fast.  Mind you, I never had to do this for my girls. They just knew what needed to be done and when. They figured out a schedule and myriad possible alternatives in case their desired courses were filled. Once they had what they needed, they then asked me to put the credit card info in, and, just like that, they were registered. My son, however, waited until the last minute to even figure out which classes are recommended for his major–or for any major, for that matter. So, I was in a scramble-bamble to help him determine what was necessary. And of course, being this day and age and trying to enroll in a public junior college, the pickings are extremely slim. There isn’t enough money to pay enough professors to fill the need for the students, so the students suffer. We all suffer. Especially me. Today. I was on my last nerve, in a panic, trying to help him out, while simultaneously working on two assignments, which are timed. Picture the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Picture me being trampled on said floor.

And if that isn’t bad enough, in the middle of it all, my son looked out the front window to see a meter man (or whatever the male equivalent of meter maid is) getting back into his buggy after leaving a parking citation on my van–the van my son drives and had parked with the front bumper one foot over the red curb. A curb that was painted only at the prompting of a neighbor who wanted another feuding neighbor to stop parking his and his visitors’ vehicles all over the cul-de-sac. So, within the next thirty days, if and when I can find the time, I will have to send a letter off to the city to fight this ticket. The city will probably be reluctant to give in, being that it’s an institution that gets funding from the same people who won’t allocate enough money to the colleges in order to provide enough classes for their students. Sometimes I just want to pack it up and move away. But what state isn’t suffering like this one?

I’m guessing Hawaii.