This was written last night, but Blogger was down, so I'm posting it now:

Well, today could have gone better...

I should have seen that things were off to a bad start when I opened my e-mail, only to discover that one of my favorite writers had announced that he was leaving the show he had created and written for the last four years. Between The West Wing and Ed, Wednesday was the only night of TV I made any real effort to watch anymore. But Ed has been moved to Friday, and teeters on the edge of cancellation, and I just can't see the point of watching The West Wing without Sorkin. He brought a caliber of dramatic writing unheard of in television today. The three final episodes of the second season will stand, in my mind, as the best dramatic writing ever seen on television, or in just about any medium, really. Brilliant, brilliant stuff.

And sure, it's been hard to live up to that, but even Sorkin's lows over the two years since then have been higher than anything else on TV. The only TV shows I get remotely as much pleasure from are all comedies like South Park or Futurama. The Daily Show is a fine piece of television, sure, but nothing gives me quite the rush that seeing Sorkin pull off the unexpected with humor and pathos. He may go on to other projects (and I certainly hope he does), but he will have to work hard to find a situation that has such built in drama like the presidency, and gather such a talented ensemble. I enjoyed Sports Night, but I loved The West Wing.

But enough about that. After that start, the rest of my day probably couldn't help to feel a bit cursed. I dashed off a follow-up letter for a job that I really want, and went to hand-deliver it, but got completely and utterly lost on the way there, so the trip took about two or three times what it should have. Then I took what I thought was going to be a quick trip to find a CD (Opeth's "Still Life") by a band that I was trying to decide whether to see in concert on Saturday. When the first store (which I again got lost on my way to) I went to didn't have it, I decided to try another. That one was out as well, and quickly, it became a crusade. I visited every record store in town that I could manage, and finally found the CD at the fifth one I hit.

The only problem is, when I finally made it home, I discovered that I had bought the wrong record. Going by copyright date, I had assumed that the one with the most recent copyright date would be the one I wanted. Except it wasn't. They had released three records in the recent past, and I wanted the middle one, released at the end of last year -- but only in Europe. So the dates were all screwed up. And like an idiot, I had already opened the plastic.

To make matters worse, I discovered that the band was here last night, so I already missed them, and that three hours of driving and hunting was for nothing. I could have just ordered it online (for less, I'm sure) and achieved the same result, more or less.

Written up, it hardly seems like the kind of soul-draining day that it was, but I'm probably not doing a very good job conveying the difficulties I encountered along the way. And that's probably because I am just want to be done with it all. Reliving all the details again seems idiotic. I was supposed to spend the day writing, with a brief detour to deliver a letter and buy a CD, but it as things turned out, I wasted half the day and all of my energy on fool's errands.

Tomorrow should be better. I'm going with a group of friends to see an early matinee of X-Men 2, and that should leave the rest of the day open for doing the things I had hoped to get done today. Maybe I'll even get lucky and find somebody to buy that CD from me...