Well, folks, we made it. Today happened. Again. Just like yesterday, and just like the day before that, which historians are now referring to as "the good old days" because at least back then we didn't know what was coming.
I woke up this morning, checked my phone, and was immediately greeted by 47 notifications, 46 of which were either a news alert about something deeply upsetting or a push notification from an app I don't remember downloading telling me my cart misses me. The 47th was my mother asking if I'd eaten. Thanks, Mom. I haven't, but emotionally, I've been snacking on dread all day, so it evens out.
Today, in the grand American tradition, I did the following: I stared at my ceiling for eleven minutes, I reheated coffee I didn't finish yesterday, and I engaged in a spirited internal debate about whether responding to a work email with "per my last email" counts as a war crime. It does. I sent it anyway.
The news today was, as always, a delightful buffet of things I cannot control. Somewhere, a billionaire did something that will somehow make my rent go up. Somewhere else, a congressperson said a sentence that sounded like it was generated by a malfunctioning AI trained exclusively on corporate retreats. And somewhere in between, the stock market did that thing where it goes up for no reason and down for even less of a reason, like a toddler with a sugar rush.
I also saw that it's apparently a "record-breaking" day for something. It always is. Every day is record-breaking now. Hottest day, coldest day, wettest day, most layoffs, most billionaires, most people googling "is it just me or is everything weird." It's not just you. It's never been just you.
But here's the thing about today: it was aggressively ordinary. No alien invasion. No sudden collapse of the dollar. My avocado was perfectly ripe, which, if you know anything about avocados, is basically a miracle on par with loaves and fishes. I got a parking spot on the first try. A dog looked at me with what I can only describe as genuine respect. These are the small victories we cling to, because the big ones are currently stuck in committee.
Yet, despite all evidence pointing to "everything is fine, nothing to see here," I couldn't shake the feeling that today was a loading screen. You know the one. The little spinning wheel that says "please wait" while you're pretty sure the software has actually crashed and is just too polite to tell you. That's today. That's every day lately. We're all just staring at the spinning wheel, hoping it's not a blue screen.
So, was today a good day? A bad day? Honestly, it was a Tuesday. It was the human equivalent of a shrug. We woke up, we scrolled, we sighed, we ate something, we scrolled again, and now here we are, reading an article about a day that, by all accounts, wasn't even worth writing about.
But you clicked it. I wrote it. That's connection, baby. That's the American dream.
**Op-Ed:** Look, today was never going to be the day everything got fixed. It wasn't designed to be. It was designed to be endured, like a DMV visit or a family group chat. But if you made it through without committing a felony or crying in a parking lot, congratulations—you're basically a Navy SEAL. Tomorrow's going to be exactly the same, and that's either comforting or terrifying. Your call.