Okay, I’m having a cranky day and I must vent. First, let me say that I am aware there is nothing inherently wrong with my life. I have family I love, good friends, a decent job (jobs, actually—I have a second part time job working in the box office of a local live theatre), a roof over my head, and enough to eat. Having said all that, I’m still cranky today.

I’m sure part of it is that I just woke up on the proverbial wrong side of bed. That happens to everyone—one just wakes up in a genuinely vile mood without any good reason. That happened to me this morning. I woke up, glared at my alarm clock (by the way, I don’t know whether looks can kill, but they don’t destroy technology—I tried), and made a huge show of dragging my sorry self out of bed. A wasted show, I might add, since there was no audience for my theatrics.

I had to go to Wal-Mart first thing this morning to purchase candy for a co-worker who will be running a booth at this year’s Family Preservation Conference in south Texas. Now, I realize Wal-Mart has lower prices and as a poor person, I should fully appreciate that, but I still don’t like going to Wal-Mart. It’s always crowded; the staff clearly has other places they’d rather be, and hey, who can blame them; it’s cluttered, and I always have to hit about six different aisles before I can finally find exactly what I’m looking for. Plus I hate that whole checking your receipt thing as you leave the store. It annoys me.

When I got to work, I found out the travel reimbursement voucher I’d completed for a faculty member wouldn’t clear due to insufficient funds. Now there’s a whole long story here about encumbering funds and how it impacts end-of-year financials, but I’ll spare you. Suffice to say that it took some finagling to get her reimbursement to clear.

Then I got an email from the theatre I work at giving me a new dress code. No flip-flops. Now this is perfectly reasonable and on a normal day, I’d be all “okay, no problem.” But today it makes me grumpy. I have really nice, pretty leather flip-flops that are almost as nice as sandals. “Why can’t I wear them?” I whine to myself. That’s because I’m a mean jerk, who is cranky for NO GOOD REASON.

Then my friend, V, who is organizing the whole Juarez project, changed the date of the trip. I grumped a little because the new weekend conflicts with my schedule, then offered to support them financially anyway just because I still want to be a part of it. V just emailed me back with a different date to see if that would work. See how nice and reasonable and good she is? Yet still I crank.

So now I’m cranky because I feel guilty for being cranky.