Keyless and Angry

I woke up way too early this morning thinking the other half of angry thoughts I went to bed with way too late last night. My body was lead-heavy and still asleep and I tried for nearly an hour to match my mind to it, but my brain's response was to take what I'd already been thinking and morph it into a kind of half-awake nightmare. My brain is the alto sax jazz musician who can't stop riffing on the same annoying theme, even when the club's patrons get up to leave with their drinks half finished.

Last night I loaned my keys to a classmate during the class's ten-minute evening break so that he could retrieve something he'd left in my office across campus, where he'd lingered way too long while I was trying to work earlier that afternoon. He retrieved his stuff and forgot to return my keys, which apparently spent the night in his pocket. This was a problem for me. I live 70 miles away from the town where I work and go to school. Also, I've been told I have "janitor's syndrome" where I keep too many keys all linked together in one big jangling bunch. To me this is expedient because it means all my keys--car, house, and office-- are together in one big, hard-to-lose ball.

Luckily, or unluckily depending on how you look at it, I was driving Pants' car last night and had his set of keys on me. Pants does not suffer from my syndrome and lives by the theory that keys should live separately according to their tasks, and you just grab the ones you need on your way out the door. This meant that last night I had the keys I needed to drive 70 miles back home and arrive around 10:00 only to realize that all of my other keys were missing, including the one which would let me into my house.

Here's where I get mad-- it's not like I was unable to get into my house. I had the garage door opener, which allowed me access to the (creepy) lock-less kitchen door, and even if I hadn't had that, there's still a key hidden outside, probably already incorporated into the nest of one of the black widows that live all over this part of the state, and I could have found this and gotten inside. But what if I hadn't had these fortuitous options? My classmate took off right when class ended. I don't have (or want) his phone number, and I don't know anyone in town I'd feel comfortable calling and asking if they could come pick me up and let me crash at their place.

Seriously! What if I'd had no way to get off campus last night? I couldn't even have crashed on my office floor because I had no keys.

Anyway, I discovered my keylessness last night shortly after I got home and was getting ready for bed. The situation was doubly vexing because this particular classmate has begun to get on my nerves of late. I feel bad about this. I don't like disliking people these days. I get no pleasure out of it, and in a karmic way I feel bad for thinking things like, "Where's a good case of laryngitis when someone else needs it?" But he visits my office, and lingers and lingers, and I feel like he hits on me in way that doesn't allow me any room to call him on it and ask him to stop. So I laid in bed last night feeling like a broken thermostat-- on and off I stewed and fumed, tried to start over with calming, sleep-inducing thoughts, and ended up stewing and fuming again.

The keys were waiting for me at the reception desk this morning with a note of apology, and I guess this should have made me feel better. My question is this: am I allowed to be pissed off about what could have happened? There's this whole level of vulnerability associated with my situation right now-- my husband's out of town, I live far away from work and school and get out of class late at night-- and being confronted with the question of how easily I could have been truly fucked last night kind of freaks me out. I hate having that vulnerability pointed out because essentially there's very little I can do about it.

I'm obsessed with being fair these days and trying to evaluate situations with a level head, but if I'm being honest, I am straight up battery acid mad at this guy right now.