All Because of a Broken Fob

Warning: I curse a lot in this post and I'm pretty sure there are a LOT of run on sentences. Just a heads up!

A week or so back, I met up with a friend I hadn’t seen in a long time (thanks pandemic), and we spent several hours catching up and talking about how each day we make a choice to be happy. That even though this past year has SUCKED, we still have things to smile about.

Recently, like within the last year, I have come to see that it really is a choice. Even when it’s hard. Even when it’s SUPER hard, I can CHOOSE to take the lighter path instead of living in the dark.

Well, today is one of those days where this choice is hard. Like REALLY hard. Like, screw this working to be positive BS. I want to sit in my sadness and send the middle finger right on up to the universe and scream FUCK YOU UNIVERSE. I don’t WANT this bullshit anymore.

In the midst of all of the shitstorm of today, I got into my car to make a quick and unexpected drive home from work, and bells rang and the dashboard lit up “Remote battery LOW.” In all the years I have owned a car, this has NEVER happened to me, so at that particular moment, I took it as another FU from the universe and drove home cursing yet another unimportant, bullshit thing I had to deal with.

When I got home, I spent some time dealing with the storm at hand. I sat in a shitty place, and had all the shitty feelings, and cried and cursed and yelled and prayed and cried some more. And then I remembered that fucking key fob. The one with a low battery. And BTW whose idea was it to make cars that needed fobs and even worse than that fobs that needed BATTERIES. And IF that battery dies, you can’t even START THE DAMNED CAR….and life is a little tricky now so I need my car to always start and I need that GD BATTERY!!

So in the midst of this bullshit day, I got up and slammed around and got into my purse and pulled out that stupid fob because for some Godforsaken reason it needed a new battery TODAY!

These are my keys. This is the keychain my mom and dad gave me on my 16th birthday with my first car key on it. They gave me this, because on every birthday I had ever had (and ever had at all before my dad passed) I got a postcard from my dad with this saying on it. He sent them to his patients on their birthdays and he said when I looked at that keychain he wanted me to remember whose car I was driving, and the best way to do that was to remind me of ALL those cards he sent. I have transferred every car key/fob I have had since then to this keychain. For 34 years, I have kept this keychain in my purse.

When I pulled it out today, I didn’t even notice what it said. Just like I didn’t understand why my car picked today to tell me I needed a new battery in the midst of a chaos shitstorm.

As today went on and I was sitting here in my sad, it hit me. I believe we have angels watching over us. I believe that sometimes we get signs. I think today, I got a pretty strong one, that came in the form of a bad battery in a key fob and a message on my dashboard telling me to look at my keychain.

HEY YOU! PAY ATTENTION!! Today is gonna suck Tina. I’m going to find a way to make you see this. It WILL get better. Even on a day when you don’t feel at all like smiling, remember that you will again soon. Keep TRYING to choose to be happy.

KEEP SMILING!

Thanks Dad. As hard as it is today, I’ll try.