An Ode to Yesterday

A good day is a rare event. I’m not trying to be depressing saying this — it’s scientifically proven. If days were rated and put on a graph, laws of probability dictate that the graph would show a bell curve: a few days would deserve the labels of “dumpy” or “wicked awesome,” but most would fall between “meh” and “alright alright.” Of course, there can be temporary runs of good or bad days depending on the circumstances, but I argue that, over a lifetime, day rankings would produce the distribution described above (and I challenge anyone who has been ranking and recording their days since birth to prove me wrong). “Why, oh why, Ben,” you are probably asking, “did you just pour such profound knowledge all over my face?” Well, I just want everyone to know exactly what I mean when I make the following statement: In the life of Middkid Sid, yesterday was a good day.

Not a “Sid got a job!” or a “Sid just fixed climate change!” or a “Justin Bieber went back to elementary school!” good day. Yesterday was good in a more subtle way, in that it happened, kept happening, and then ended, without anything going noticeably wrong. But this alone does not constitute a truly good day. Yesterday was tremendous.

Yesterday was a day of adventure. In the morning, via BBC’s Life on DVD, Sid traveled the world. He saw the wonders of evolution in action, with monkeys flying through trees, lizards walking on water and komodo dragons watch their prey slowly die over a span of two weeks. Sid wanted to say “Wow,” and then he realized that nothing was stopping him, so he did. In the afternoon, he stepped outside with no destination and walked around. Everything was beautiful. Every tree swaying in the breeze, every raindrop on his face and every rotund squirrel descending into a receptacle of human waste was worth every second of his attention. Sid even thought he saw a couple monkeys swinging around the trees on Battell Beach. He was happy to have monkeys on his campus.

Yesterday was a day of freedom. There were worries of the future, like Sid’s financial status after graduation, as well as worries of the past, like all money he had spent on Grille food and New Amsterdam Gin in the past couple months. But these worries were not worries of the present, and therefore were not worries of yesterday.
More than anything, yesterday was real. Sid did his work and honored his commitments, but saved time to be a king of relaxation, fanned by servants waving those huge leaves while he destroyed Bowser in MarioKart. At the same time, he was not a zombie and not a menace to society. He didn’t rob banks, sell drugs to kids or vandalize the library. Yesterday was a day of responsibility, and still it was good.

Yesterday was, quite literally, mind-blowing. The take-out burger joint called Life cooked a juicy patty of happiness, wrapped it up, passed it to Sid, and he ate it. Of course, every day can’t be like yesterday. After all, if the good became the norm, the bell curve theory implies that it would cease to be good.  Yesterday was a respite from bearing the full weight of life, and breaks such as these are essential to health and pleasure. I urge everyone to allow themselves days like yesterday, regardless of the state of their schedule — break times are just as important as work times.  I hope everybody has had such a day in the not so distant past, and to those it may concern, happy yesterday.