Three Dollar Joke

The alternate title for this blog is First World Problems, a term my daughter Talia uses to describe the stupid little things privileged people get upset about. I had a five-star F.W.P. day and I need to vent. But I see your eyes rolling, so I’ll keep it short.

1. Typing on the computer this morning, letters started to randomly jump out of sequence and appear elsewhere on the page. Seriously! I re-started and it didn’t help. I let it sit for awhile and the problem was gone. But still the stress hormones of maddening incomprehension had been released and were working to shorten my life span.

2. Walking to the car, I dropped my I-Pod, which just this once, wasn’t in it’s protective case. The back cover popped off, which made for an intriguing peek into its insides. But no time to be curious—I was counting on it to accompany me on the drive (see below) and here I was on my way to shopping pounding it with my fist to snap it back together. Even ajar, the lights went on, so I had a little hope. When I miraculously managed to snap it together and went to play it, it miraculously worked! Except now the settings were different— things called Slide Show/ TV in/ TV out that I had never seen and no way to get to the songlist. I could skip from one song to the next alphabetically, but with some 5,000 tunes that started at A, this was not going to be a viable strategy when I wanted to play “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” for the kids at school. Aaargh!

3. Took a leap and decided to take a jazz piano class this afternoon. The problem? It was in Berkeley across the Bay and the BART Transit strike pretty much insured more traffic than usual. And there was. Nothing like getting stuck in traffic with the clock ticking past the class starting time to flood the system with more stress.

4. I arrive at the Berkeley Jazz School at 2:03 (class began at 2:00) and parking was predictably non-existent, so I went into the parking garage and discovered the rates went up after…you guess it. 2:00. Missed it by three minutes! Dang! 

5. Got to the class and was disappointed that it was talking instead of playing. Some interesting moments, but the teacher got to the end of the theme a half-hour early. He suggested he fill the remaining time telling jokes, but instead found a tangent to pursue. At the end, I asked him to tell one of the jokes. Big mistake. It was cute enough, about a viola player, but when I got to the parking garage, it was…you guess it.  4:05, two minutes past the 2 hour mark for the $3.00 price. And now it was… $6.00! So I figured that this joke cost me $3. Wasn’t worth it.

Well, at least I got an interesting blog title out of it.