Have you ever had a day turn out so badly, not badly in a serious sense, but rather, badly in a sense that a minor chain of unexpected events take place, and the only option you have left to deal with these incidents besides howling at the moon and sprouting fur down your spine is to just throw your hands in the air and laugh at yourself, and finally, when you've recovered your breath from laughing tearfully at the 'comedy' of errors which is your day, comfort yourself with the thought that at least these little debacles have somehow given you something to blog about?

I'm trying to trace how things started going slightly amock considering how the day started out relatively pleasantly with a visit from my grandmother first thing in the morning wherein she gave me a bag which I decided to use because I knew it would make her happy, besides, it wasn't half bad looking, considering. I emptied my current favorite bag, the one i've been using for the past few weeks, and even made a point of making sure that I transferred my office keys from one bag to the next, I even double checked, too bad that I must have checked once too many times because when I got to work, the keys were nowhere to be found, i'd transferred them right back to my old bag which must have decided to take vengeance on me on the belief that I had discarded it. Okay, so someone had an extra set of keys so I won't hold a grudge over that. Besides, it's nice to be appreciated, even if it's just by a bag.

I won't even go on about how i've been stuck using Lipton iced tea for days ever since some other greedy iced tea hog decided to go on a flurry of buying all the packs of Nestea lemon flavored iced tea displayed in all the groceries in the area and how I decided that i'd be magnanimous about it, and just wait it out with Lipton while Nestea was attempting to replenish their stock until I took a sip from the insulated thermos I thought i'd try out this morning to hold my 'brew' *cackle*, and what I tasted was about, oh, 99% of iron oxide mixed with something too unpleasant to even think of defining the taste of, and less than 1% of what used to be Lipton's version of what iced tea should be. Okay, so i'm over that as well.

But the straw which finally broke the camel's back were the shoes. Oh those shoes. I have to hold back tears thinking about them, tears of rage mixed in with tears of half-deranged laughter. Before that though, I won't even dwell too much on about how when we got to this place in Manila which will soon probably be known as the world's capital of piracy wherein there are copies of everything which was, about a moment ago, unique, patented and original, the first thing my eyes lit on was an exact facsimile of the bag I was using which just this very morning my grandmother was proudly extolling as expensive, which I took to mean, original. If the bag had already not been on my shoulder before I had entered the stall, make that stalls, I may very well have been accused of shoplifting. Okay, so there were about a dozen bags just like the one I was using all over the place, no big deal.

I was just happy though about getting the chance to finally purchase the immitation (*grin* after the bags, how can you expect that it would be an original?), though, [-brand-deleted-to-preserve-at-least-an-ounce-of-pride-] driving shoes which I saw almost a week ago. Truth is I wasn't expecting that it would still be there because of the split second purchase of goods in this place. To my delight though, they were still there, in among one of the most far off stores of the place, right where I left them the week before. I had to try on four pairs till I got to one that fit comfortably as there seemed to be some discrepancy about its sizing and the size my feet normally wear. Anyhow, it was decided in the end that I get the black ones instead of the blue ones which attracted me at first because there were no longer any sizes available. After a lenghty discussion with the owner of the store and her minions (you'll see in a second why I refer to them as such), about the attributes of the color I had finally settled on, I bartered and got the price I asked for and went happilly on my way, shoe box in hand. It was clear to me at this point that since I had discarded the blue ones because they pinched my feet that it was obvious that it were the black ones I was purchasing, especially after having them try so hard to convince me that this pair looked more striking anyway.

So we walked the long way back to the car and when I excitedly opened the box to get a glimpse of my much awaited rubbershoes, I felt a sick sense of horror as I saw that the shoes nestled in the box were the too tight blue ones. I am rendered mute for a second before a wave of unadulterated rage washed over me at their sheer... I don't even know if it's incompetence or duplicity. All I know is that since the shop was closed by the time we returned to let them know that they had given me the wrong pair of shoes, I have no choice but to go back tomorrow. Nothing left to do then but to resign myself to going home empty handed after days of waiting. I couldn't very well camp out in front of their store for the night.

I just had to smile to check if I still could.

I am finally seeking comfort in the oxtail (though this time they used innards) stew which I was having for dinner after having have relayed the sorry tale to qs who mercifully enough didn't scold me for being too careless to check the box, when all of a sudden while trying to tug a piece on my plate into half, it spurts sauce right into my white shirt and into the white linen of the chair i'm sitting on, right in front of our laundrywoman who considers these linens as her pride and joy.

Besides this blog though, today's mishaps and qsez insights on the matter have provided me with priceless lessons as well. First, when you buy shoes, it isn't enough to check the box to make sure that the shoes there are the ones you actually bought, you must wear the shoes out of the store and not take them off till you get into bed lest the wily salesladies switch them as you walk. This also applies to clothes, price tags, new clothes smell and all, don't take them off until you're safely out of the store, not until you have your laundry basket in sight, and speaking off laundry, as for food, don't bother cutting them up into small pieces, swallow them whole if you must to avoid ruining the linens, learn to control your gag mechanism lest you end up doing more harm than good.

Or you can follow your father's half joking advice and avoid buying immitation rubbershoes, only to have him at a loss for a reply when your mother tells him to give you money to buy original ones first.

Laughter then, tinged with insanity as it may be, is unavoidable.