Mercury is in Retrograde....

...which apparently explains why everything in my life is coming apart at the seams. 

Last night at 8:30pm: I received a text, confirming a playdate for my 5-yr old.  Life, as I know it, calmly sailed on smooth waters. 

10:00pm: I began to feel nauseous, with severe abdominal cramps.  Thinking it would dissipate, I took a deep breath and focused on my happy place.  30 minutes later, exhaling the bitter fumes of defeat, I crawled out of the bath, noticing in my haze of agony, that the text message which was earlier labeled "Erica", was now labeled as a phone number.  Odd.  (if checking texts while doubled over in pain is a sign of addiction, then I deny I checked my text)

10:45pm:  In bed, the roiling seas of nausea behind me, I tried to decipher the mystery of the text message. Scrolling through all my recent texts, I realized with a shock of impending doom, that NONE of them are labeled with names, only phone numbers.  Frantically moving to my Address Book, my brain swirling in bitter confusion and absolute denial, I am confronted with the incontrovertible truth.  My Address Book is blank.   Virgin, unadulterated like a newborn babe.  Or, empty as the burned out husk of a murderer/rapist/thief's soul in the pits of hell. 

11:00pm: Desperately tried to get online to contact Tech Support at Apple, but my MacBook wouldn't respond to my ceaseless and insistent pecking, the internet frozen and unsympathetic to my plight.  It took 15 minutes to defrost the internet, 115 minutes for my blood pressure normalize.

12:30am:  The online job application I'd nearly completed somehow spontaneously deleted all the fields of (long-winded) written responses I'd just spent an hour composing/editing/re-editing.  I accept this as a sign that my answers sucked and someone was telling me to start fresh later. 

The next day 3:45pm:  Appointment at the Genius Bar to deal with this catastrophe.  My assigned Genius is the guy who couldn't answer his own name last time, and though tempted to just cancel and surreptitiously reschedule on his day off, I decided to give him ONE last try.  I was desperate, after all. This time, he did seem to understand my problem, and, after going in the back to ask the REAL Genius, did give me blow-by-blow instructions to retrieve my lost data on my Time Capsule external hard-drive (thank you, Mark, for making me buy this!!!!) which were NOT intuitive at all when I spent hours trying to figure it out myself last night. 

5:00pm:  Home to try out above instructions.  Yes, I did find the data, YAAAYYYY!!  However, I'm stymied by how to put said data back into my current Address book.  Ugh.  Very frustrating, but comforting to know it is THERE. No longer homicidal, just frustrated and sleep-deprived/overly-caffeinated.   

10:30pm:  Can't get my MacBook to work. I try repeatedly to open Firefox, to no avail.  I try to Force Quit, and see that Firefox is open, but then come to the disturbing realization that NOTHING is responding.  In fact, I can't even Shut Down.  Weird. 

11:00pm:  Finally pressed and held Power button to reset Macbook.  As it's rebooting, I grab my iPhone to check email.  You guessed it....not working, screen frozen.  WTF. 

If my life is thoroughly and utterly screwed when Mercury is in retrograde, and I will admit that this analogous scenario HAS happened twice before, only later to be identified and blamed on Mercury's retrograditude, then shouldn't there be a polar-opposite planet in futuregrade that makes me win the lottery?