The Art of Being Livid

I knew when I woke up this morning that it was going to be a bad day. You just get that feeling when you roll over and realize that your apartment is the temperature of your standard winter tundra. I stared at my phone knowing that even contemplating resetting my alarm was just postponing the inevitable: Tuesday, or Hell as I have come to affectionately call it… but I’ll explain that pet name later. I got out of bed, cut off the parts of my leg deadened by frostbite, and got into the car.

On the way to work, I subconsciously decided to take a route that I’ve never taken before, twenty minutes away from the metro stop that I actually intended to drive toward. And when you take twenty minutes to drive in the opposite direction, it gives you a long time to consider all of the things that are really pissing you off in the world. I thought about how PBS might be cancelled by this time next year. I thought about how those Chinese girls in the Beijing Olympics were obviously too young to compete. I thought about how Glee is on hiatus until November. (Oh, you didn’t know? Welcome to my day.) By the time that I actually got to the metro, I was locked and loaded. I was the conductor of the train headed to Worst Day Everville.

As I stood on the metro searching for a glimmer of hope to grab on to, I was distracted by the man breathing heavily down my back… so close, that I could feel his breath condensate on my small neck hairs. And as I heard him wheeze, I asked the spirit of Helga Petacki from Hey Arnold! for forgiveness, because I mistook her violent actions toward Brainy as unnecessary lashing out. In reality, her rage was completely appropriate and justified.

And just like a narrative, a day is broken into paragraphs. Getting out of bed, driving to the metro, riding on the metro, going into work. Each event represents an ultimately separate event from the rest… however, all of those paragraphs make a story and one bad paragraph has the ability to make that story a tainted one. Call me a commitment lover, but as I got off the metro, I committed myself to a bad day. I actively chose to pursue the very worst parts of my day, and when you make a decision like that, it’s the beginning of a terrible chain of events. You commit to a bad day, then you victimize yourself in regard to all of those around you. You follow that with exclusivity to everyone else, and in your loneliness, you dredge up things from the past… and that’s the art to becoming livid.

One of the most important parts of becoming livid is choosing a single ally to have for the rest of the day: everyone else is garbage in your eyes. You can’t believe that they didn’t let you walk out of the elevator first, and if you had your way, you would have them spend an eternity in Hell for it. And luckily they will, because Tuesdays are what we like to call Hell. Mondays have such a bad reputation for being the worst day, when it reality, Monday is where hope dies.

Monday is still fresh enough out of the weekend that you remember what it was like getting hammered on Saturday and then making out with that girl in the bathroom… how did you even get in the bathroom? And that’s why Tuesday is Hell because all those sinful memories that died once you remember that the work week does in fact continue after Monday are banished to Tuesday Hell. Shame on you for being such a weekend heathen; you have been rewarded with the most hopeless day of the week, and its sky will be painted with the color of hopelessness. If Crayola made it a crayon, I imagine it would be called “Kill Myself Gray.”

Throughout the day, you find reasons that you could possibly find joy, but let’s be honest. You have a whole drawer full of “Kill Myself Gray” colored crayons, and you just aren’t ready to throw those out. So in my case, I equated everything that I had to do today to climbing Mount Everest, and when I messed it up, it was obviously not my fault because I was up against insurmountable circumstances.

And as the day goes on, there’s only one thing to do… capitalize. You start listing all the things that have gone wrong about your day, down to the most minute of circumstances. Sometimes, if you haven’t had enough go wrong, it’s completely permissible to draw on things from the past and pretend that they happened to you on the Tuesday in question. But today, I made a grave error in my execution of the horrible day. I had identified my ally, a fellow intern named Nicole. We shared our disgust for the day, down to how much of an injustice that it was that I didn’t wear my peacoat to work. And in vain, I made a selfish, careless error. I attempted to enlist a second ally.

So, when I came home, I turned to my roommate Andrew with too high of expectations. Some would argue that he had no dog in this fight (author’s note: I do not support Michael Vick or his preference for dog fighting), but in my world, he should have known everything. And we’ve been sentimental lately in true bromance fashion, so I could only assume that if there were a set of arms available to run into, it would surely be his. But the fact of the matter is that the whole evening was quite the opposite. Moments like these are your opportunity to implement “the livid.” Opportunities like these are like the devil’s cherry atop the Hell sundae that Tuesdays are.

Implementing the livid is a three-step process, and I will teach you through example. (1) I walked into my apartment looking as disheveled as I could, as if I had planned it when I woke up that morning.  The look on my face reflected a possible death of a pet or a recent viewing of Hotel Rwanda. And to finish, I cavalierly threw my bag onto the couch and announced I had a horrible day. For added effect, I gave a bulleted list of everything that had gone wrong. His response was I watched Avengers today. An ignorant, yet perfect, response if I’ve heard one. This is the classic error that lends itself perfectly to building on the next two steps. Responses like this allow you to assert the feeling that you’ve been devalued.

Don’t let yourself stop there. This is the moment that you have to bring the spotlight back to… you guessed it… yourself. (2) Knowing that we were obviously not going to discuss, let alone exchange empathy, about the terrible day, I decided that I wanted to voice another, more solvable issue. I’m tired of just coming home from work and not doing anything. What are you doing later this week? He responds, I’m going out on Thursday, and then I’m going to Happy Hour on Friday. And only a writer or a very hormonal woman (I'm arguably both) would pick up on the underlying issue of that sentence: pronoun use. And with that, you have all the ammunition you need because you have just been offered what society likes to call “the pity invite.” I immediately responded, Oh, I think we were going to Happ… am I not invited? And like magic, he provided me with another perfect response. You are now! Don’t stop yet… you haven’t justified yourself in a completely self-deprecating way… I responded, No, I’m not going to crash something I wasn’t invited to. At that point, you’ve positioned yourself perfectly for one of my favorite life roles: the victim.

I excused myself for an impromptu trip outside without saying a word, and I smoked a cigarette in my socks in the same tundra like weather that was in my room that morning. And when I came back in, I finished strong. (3) As I walked in, he asked me Hey! How ya doing? And if you are so lucky to have such an opportunity, you respond like I did: I’m fine. That’s all you need to say, and if you’re ambitious like me, you go to a remote location, and you wait for someone to come to you. Fine is a terribly loaded word full of hate and anger and desperation. And the only thing that can trigger “fine” into full-blown livid is when it’s the end of your story. I waited in my room for thirty minutes for someone to come ask what was wrong, and I heard our front door close twice. And once I walked into the living room to confirm my suspicion, the livid was allowed to rear its ugly head.

Everyone had left, and that’s when I went “ape shit.” I quickly announced Oh hell no! and from there, I decided to run into things, throw things, slam things… akin to a seven year old, or a dog with rabies. You see, livid has no boundaries. Livid is allowed to do whatever the hell it wants because you… yes, you. You have committed an entire day to get to this point, and you deserve to do whatever your irrationally enraged heart desires. And as I walked out the door, I slammed it so hard that it echoed up the stairwell, and there’s a 72% chance that it broke. I didn’t really go back to check because that’s not what livid does. Livid takes no prisoners, at least when the victim is something that you don’t have to say goodnight to.