I put the "ho" in hope. (No, I don't.)

I can be a little cynical.

(I will pause for a moment while those people who know and love me take a second to react to that SHOCKING REVELATION.)

For the record, I am trying to be more hopeful -- to the extent that I'm getting the word "hope" tattooed on my left arm in tiny cursive on my birthday. But I am, if we're talking about it in the parlance of Grey's Anatomy, which is the manner in which all things are best discussed (see, here I'm being SARCASTIC, which is DIFFERENT from being cynical, a distinction swathed in shades of grey NO PUN INTENDED [I realize I'm being insufferable right now]), I am far more "dark and twisty" than "bright and shiny." I'm the sort of person who RECOGNIZES the fact that life is full of moments of beauty and connection, but I need to see those moments for me to truly BELIEVE that.

Yesterday was not that sort of day. Indeed, yesterday was the sort of day where one watches a drunk man berate a pregnant woman (a stranger to him) on a bus for stop after stop after stop, ignoring the other passengers asking him to knock it the fuck off, until he finally gets off and she bursts into tears, and one bursts into tears with her, because she was treated so unkindly.

But today came on strong and won me over. My former co-workers took two hours out of their workday today to feed me lunch and laugh about everything and nothing, and at the end of the meal, after I'd scarfed down a portion and a half of lunch, asked kindly and with no condescencion if I was okay to afford food, completely willing to help out if I wasn't. My bus driver saw me sprinting uphill to the nearest stop in a dress and flips and pulled over at a stopless corner. Twitter rescheduled its maintanence after they were innundated with tweets asking them to please put it off so the voices of Iranians only able to communicate through that medium wouldn't be silenced -- it amazes me that a corporation was asked by its customers to do the right thing, and the corporation said yes.

There were other nice things -- a baby to snuggle, Ramona Forever read by Stockard Channing waiting for me at the library -- but it wasn't till I came home and read this that I was ready to call this a good day, ready to climb in bed with a bowl of ice cream, ready to let myself hope that tomorrow would be good too.