My recipe for dealing with a crappy day...

When you've woken up in a foul mood despite your best efforts at meditation, coffee, proper eating, followed by eating junk food when eating healthy doesn't work...when your cat wants in the second you put him out for the eighteenth time in an hour, and nobody who is supposed to email you emails you, and everyone you don't want to talk to calls you and you get more spam than usual...when your stepfather has one accident in his car, then his motorcycle, which he takes to the doctor after the car accident craps out on him and you must help him arrange to get his rental car...when you must cancel an interview, but possibly because it is Mercury Retrograde, or possibly because it's just your luck they didn't get your two phone messages and sound very irate with you because you're flustered and tired and were already cranky to begin with...when you're owed more than $2500 from the service you edit for who has reliably paid you in the past but who stretches those payments out further and further over time...when you've got a novel to begin editing but can't bear to open it...when some of your friends who you haven't seen in awhile are planning a get together that you can't make...when your husband's big licensing test results won't be in for another month and so you have yet more time to stress...and when somehow turning 31 in two weeks seems way more wacked out and old than turning 30...there is only one thing you can reliably do that will solve this whole, godforsaken, should be forgotten day...

People magazine.

How can you feel bad when Christopher Reeves' widow is fighting lung cancer and their son is probably about to be orphaned? It's hard to feel crappy in sight of Gwyneth Paltrow's shining mug (and doesn't she look great so soon after a baby?) It's hard to be grumpy when Paris Hilton's marriage to that other Paris might be up in the air, and GOD, what about Brad and Angelina?? And is Sienna really going to take Jude back? And has anyone noticed that Courtney Love has been sober a year? (No, we can't tell the difference, Courtney). And those three year-old phillippine twins that were joined at the head...they're living happy lives, separately! And there's a family in Atlanta, GA that has adopted 18 down syndrome kids and are giving them a better life. I mean, come on...how can I stay in a mood after this?

Try it. You'll feel better too.

JPR