Nothing was fixed. I was happy anyway.
October 3, 2026
Life Has Been Kicking My Ass
Life has been beating my ass lately.
Not in a cute, character-development way. Not in the kind of way that becomes an inspirational montage where everything falls apart for twenty minutes and then the universe rewards me with personal growth and an emotionally significant sunset.
I mean the kind where the real problems remain real. The paperwork keeps reproducing. My nervous system treats every notification like it may contain a new emergency. I finish handling one thing, look up for half a second, and discover three more things waiting for management.
Nothing is fixed.
I need to establish that before I tell you I had a good day, because people hear I had a good day and sometimes translate it into:
Oh, good. She is better now.
Absolutely the fuck not.
The shit is still on the porch.
I just left the porch.
A Potato the Size of My Problems
Lady Glitter Sparkles, my emotional-support dumbass, Meatball, and I left the house.
That sentence sounds ordinary. It was ordinary. That was part of what made it so good.
Nobody solved my life. No miraculous email arrived. Nothing was erased, reversed, approved, dismissed, funded, healed, or magically removed from the list of things currently occupying too much space in my brain.
We just went out.
Then we acquired baked potatoes so enormous they appeared to have their own gravitational pull.
I ordered a chicken-parmesan potato. Sparkles ordered a Philly-cheese-chicken potato. These were not side dishes. These were agricultural events. Each potato looked capable of feeding a small family, settling a minor dispute, or being registered as an emotional-support vegetable.
Mine arrived covered in chicken, sauce, cheese, and the kind of optimism only possible when somebody looks at a baked potato and asks, What if this were also an entire Italian dinner?
For the first time in a while, the largest thing in front of me was not a problem.
It was a potato.
Meatball Conducts Quality Control
Meatball naturally needed to inspect the merchandise.
By inspect, I mean she tasted some of the food, wore some of the food, and generally participated in dinner like a tiny, unlicensed restaurant critic with no respect for textiles.
She is still new enough to eating that every meal is part nutrition, part sensory experiment, and part crime scene. Food enters the immediate area. Some reaches her mouth. Some reaches her face. Some becomes an accessory. Nobody can fully explain the distribution process.
She was happy, though. She sat there with potato on her like she had personally contributed to the preparation and was now enjoying the fruits of her labor.
Sparkles and I laughed. Meatball continued her investigation. The potatoes continued existing at an unreasonable scale.
And somewhere in the middle of all that, I noticed something.
I was happy.
Not performing happiness. Not taking a cute picture while mentally standing somewhere else. Not making the best of things because mothers are expected to turn every difficult season into a gratitude exercise.
I was genuinely, uncomplicatedly happy.
The hard things had not left. They had simply stopped being the only things in the room.
The Claw Machine Accomplices
After dinner, we encountered claw machines.
Claw machines are brightly lit little cabinets built to teach children about capitalism, disappointment, and the structural limitations of hope.
You put in money. You position the claw. You believe. The claw descends with all the gripping strength of a sedated toddler and gently strokes the prize before returning empty-handed.
Except this time, the employees became our accomplices.
They stood plushies up to give Sparkles a better chance. They helped move prizes closer to the bucket. At least once, the line between customer service and participation in a very low-stakes heist became beautifully unclear.
Sparkles got Minnie for Meatball and Kirby’s Meta Knight for Grandpappy. For me, she got Harry Potter and a tiny anime-looking Voldemort who was far too cute for a man who spent seven books committing magical felonies.
There was something deeply funny about watching my emotional-support dumbass fight machinery for custody of a chibi Dark Lord while strangers quietly assisted the operation.
The employees did not know what kind of week I was having. They did not know what I had been carrying. They were just being kind. They saw people trying to win something and decided to make the odds a little less shitty.
Sometimes kindness is enormous.
Sometimes it is somebody standing a plush toy back up so the claw has a chance in hell.
The Shitshow Took the Day Off
For a few hours, I was not waiting for the next thing to go wrong.
I was eating a potato the size of my unresolved issues. I was watching Meatball wear dinner. I was laughing with Sparkles. I was collecting tiny pieces of joy from machines designed to withhold them.
Nothing had changed, and something had changed.
My circumstances were the same. My body had simply remembered that it could still feel something besides fear, anger, exhaustion, and the low electrical hum of waiting for impact.
That mattered.
A good day does not have to repair your life to be real. Joy does not become dishonest because grief, fear, or uncertainty still exists beside it. You do not have to finish suffering before you are allowed to laugh.
Sometimes happiness does not arrive after the hard part.
Sometimes it sits down right in the middle of it, steals a bite of your giant potato, wins you a suspiciously adorable Voldemort, and reminds you that the hard part has not swallowed everything.
When Life Shits on Your Porch
When life shits on your porch, leave the fucking porch.
Not because the shit will not still be there when you get home.
It will.
You may still have to clean it up. You may still need help. You may still be angry that it happened. Leaving for a few hours does not remove the mess or make it acceptable.
But apparently there are giant potatoes, claw-machine accomplices, babies covered in food, and emotional-support dumbasses waiting beyond it.
So acquire a potato the size of your problems.
Feed some to the baby.
Terrorize the general public with your emotional-support dumbass.
Let strangers help you steal a tiny Voldemort from a rigged machine.
Be happy for a few hours anyway.
✨ BALANCE ✨
-EC 🌈
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