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Things tend to go wrong. This is a series of blog posts about the things I think about during those moments when the wrong things happen.

It’s my senior year at school. I’m in a photography class that I need to pass for graduation. The prof hands us a final assignment: A portfolio of seven photos. We’ve got a month to shoot it. These seven photos are worth half of our final grade.

I have a roommate working for the Obama campaign in mid-Missouri. The day after the election, I go with him to the office. They’re shutting everything down, and everyone’s saying their goodbyes. I spend the day there with my camera, shooting portraits, shooting the office. I get my seven photos. I’m happy.

About a week before the assignment is due, I pull out the grading rubric. I’ve got all the details down. I’ve got my seven photos. I’ve got a range of subjects and photographic styles.

Then I see this little sentence about halfway down the page:

“Please photograph only one person.”

Uh-oh.

I’ve got a lot of photos. And they’re of lots of different people.

I probably should have read the rubric a bit more closely before starting the project.

But this is no time to panic. I open up the laptop, tab over to Wikipedia and begin hammering out a 1,500 word essay on Albert Camus’ “The Stranger.” My essay is titled, “An Overly Complex Explanation of Why I Am Unable to Obey Rules and Instead Choose to Fight Unnecessary Existential Battles.” In it, I argue that I am presenting a portfolio of photos about Barack Obama in which Barack Obama does not appear. Instead, he appears through the faces of his campaign workers and volunteers — the people who fought for him, who worked for him, who took his beliefs and ideals and made them their own.

I write:

So I see this final project as a photo essay about the faces of one man: Barack Obama. Each of the people I’ve photographed was so involved with the campaign that on election day, they viewed the Obama victory as a clear validation of their own efforts and their own beliefs….

What I’m arguing is that existentially, every single Obama volunteer ceased to exist as an individual for a few months and took on the personality and belief system of Barack Obama. They believed in him to the point where they could feasibly understand Obama and understand the emotions that he went through during the election. I am arguing, ridiculous as it sounds, that a person is not defined by the physical body but by the ability for rational, independent thought. And as every single Obama volunteer acted as a representative of Barack Obama, working for his thoughts/ideas/beliefs, these volunteers were merely an extension of Obama.

So what follows is my photo essay about Barack Obama, the day after the election. The catch is that the physical presence of Barack Obama does not appear.

I attach the essay to my portfolio. It is a historic piece of bullshit, and I am convinced that my teacher — who I have already pissed off a few times this semester — will call me out on it.

She does not. I am, instead, given an A- for my work, and my teacher commends me for my creativity.

I have gone from “Oh, fuck!” to “Fuck, yeah!”

Which brings me around to something my dad likes to say. I grew up an amazingly lucky kid. I grew up in a nice suburb, and I went to a great school. My elementary school had a planetarium — not the Hayden or anything, but still, a big dome on which you could trace the structure of Milky Way — and I didn’t think much of it. For the longest time, I assumed every school had a planetarium. I got to go on vacations to the beach and to the mountains. Before I graduated high school, I’d been to four continents.

This all seemed ordinary.

Dad likes to refer to me and my two siblings as The Lucky Sperm Club, and he’s absolutely right. I was born into a world that was far too good to me. My world was safe. My parents were — still are, actually — happily married. I had my own car, my own room, and all the Girl Scout cookies I could eat. Today, I’m not saddled by college-related debt because my family had the money to put me through school.

I was born into this Wonder Years of a life, and into a world that nurtured me and let me focus on just growing up.

The deck was absolutely stacked in my favor.

So when I end up in a situation where I’m convinced that everything’s going wrong, it’s not hard for me to remind myself to stop making excuses. I didn’t grow up in a world that threw roadblocks at me. My world was one where people got fast-tracked to opportunity.

I try to remind myself: Shut up and deal with adversity, Dan. It’s about time you had some in your life.

Things tend to go wrong. This is a series of blog posts about the things I think about during those moments when the wrong things happen.

So it’s January 2008. My alma mater, in their infinite wisdom, has decided to allow me to attend a semester of classes in Alicante, Spain, a little town on the Mediterranean coast. Let that sink in: I am getting college credit for going to school by the beach. I’m flying out there before they can change their minds.

My grandma insists on helping me out with the travel arrangements. She’s got a travel agent down in Boca that she uses for international travel. Call her, she says.

So I do. The travel agent turns what should be a two legged trip — DC to Madrid to Alicante — into three. I pack my bags. I fly to Atlanta mid-afternoon. I take the overnight flight to Madrid. We get off the plane in Madrid and onto the jetway. Then off the jetway and into one of those special international terminal hallways that shuttles you straight to customs.

We stop moving.

But I’m feeling alright. Tired, but alright. It’s 6 a.m. in Spain, midnight back home. I’ve got Jack Johnson strumming in the earbuds, so I don’t even mind when an airline rep comes to the front of the pack and tells us: The door to let us into customs is locked. And the guy with the key to unlock the doors won’t be here for 45 minutes.

Still, I’m in no rush. It’s 6 a.m. My flight to Alicante isn’t until 11. I didn’t really sleep last night, so I’m a bit too tired to be mad. I just chill. Enjoy the surf music. Try to nap while standing upright. Ignore the crying children and annoyed parents and harried businessmen. I put myself in the zone, and I feel alright.

The keymaster shows up, and the door opens, and I wait in customs for a while, and then I’m through. Grab my bags, get on a shuttle and head over to the domestic terminal for the last leg of my trip.

My flight’s already on the board when I get there: 11 a.m. to Alicante. The line for Iberia, Spain’s national airline, moves kinda slow, but I’m in no rush. I get to the front. I throw my two massive bags on the scale. I hand the rep my confirmation number. She is a very pretty airline rep sitting in a row of very pretty airline reps. It is hard not to feel at ease.

I try to start the conversation in Spanish, even though my travel Spanish is pretty much limited to, “Hi, here’s my photo ID.” She starts typing my information into the computer. She types with the same fury that American gate agents tend to use while typing; she types as though hoping to inflict pain upon her keyboard. I try to wonder what this keyboard has done to wrong her.

She stops typing, and looks up at me. And then she says something in rapid-fire Spanish.

I gaze blankly. I am far too tired to actually put together the energy to stare.

She switches to English. “Your 11 a.m. flight to Alicante has been cancelled,” she says.

I point to the board. “But what about that 11 a.m. flight to Alicante?” I ask.

“There is an 11 a.m. flight to Alicante,” she says. “You are not on it.”

So this is the kind of moment I am in: It is 9 a.m. in Spain and 3 a.m. in America. I have 70 lbs. of luggage with me. I do not have a cell phone. I am booked on an 11 a.m. flight that does not exist. I have not really slept in quite some time, and each moment I go without sleeping is making the lack of sleep more evident.

Things are not going well.

Of course, things get fixed. The agent explains that my initial flight was cancelled, and then a different 11 a.m. flight was scheduled. She does not know why I was not re-booked. She mentions that I should have been notified of this weeks ago, and I start to wonder whether or not my grandma’s travel agent knew about my non-flight flight. She says she cannot put me on the 11 a.m. flight, even though the flight is not full. She puts me on the 1 p.m. flight instead.

This is how it will be.

So it takes a while, and I’m not entirely alive by the time I land, but I do get there, and when I get there, I am immediately taken to a hotel on the beach. It is January, and it is 65 degrees.

This is comfort enough.

But I like to think of two songs by Townes Van Zandt at such moments. There are days like the one I had at Madrid Int’l, days that seem to confirm that whatever gods exist spend most of their existence seeking to make my life as difficult as possible.

Townes’ “Mr. Mudd and Mr. Gold” is a song about those very gods.

But it’s also got this magic bit of wisdom at the end. The song is about two men, Mr. Mudd and Mr. Gold, and a game of poker. Mr. Gold’s getting all the right cards. He’s winning hand after hand. And just when it looks bleak, the gods change their minds, and Mr. Mudd gets an unbeatable hand. Mr. Gold gets confident. Bets it all. Loses it all.

And the final verse goes:

Now here’s what this story’s told
If you feel like Mudd you’ll end up Gold
If you feel like lost, you’ll end up found
So amigo, lay them raises down

That’s always a nice reminder on the worst days. Stick with it. Be patient. Luck always evens out.

The other Townes song that helps is called “Rex’s Blues.” It’s one of his best. And this is the part that crushes me:

There ain’t no dark till something shines
I’m bound to leave this dark behind

Make of that what you will, but for me, it’s always said: We can’t really understand the lows until we’ve experienced the highs. I mean, really: How can we know what is good until we’ve known that which is not?

But once we understand it, we can always hope for something better. We can always hope for a little bit of sunshine.

Or in the case of my study abroad experience, six months of topless beaches and sunshine.

(How I got college credit for it all, I’ll never know.)

Things tend to go wrong. This is a series of blog posts about the things I think about during those moments when the wrong things happen.

My sophomore year of college, I loaded up the Ford Explorer and headed to St. Louis to go watch a football game. I had a giant cooler filled with ice, beer and semi-refrigerated meats. I was wearing a yellow, pinstriped blazer. I left around rush hour.

And 10 minutes into the drive, I heard a noise under the hood that sounded distinctly like a small reserve of Roman candles going off all at once.

I pulled over in Kingdom City, this little town east of Columbia, Mo., that’s most famous for trying to secede from the Union back when that was still in fashion. They’ve got a few garages there, and I pulled into one where they serviced 18-wheelers. I kept the car running while the mechanics took a look under the hood. They didn’t look long before delivering a verdict:

My engine was about to explode.

So I won’t be driving this thing to St. Louis, I asked?

Not if you want to live, they said.

And suddenly, I found myself very much stranded in Kingdom City, Mo., population 128.

But then I started to think about contingency plans. Could I get a ride in the morning? Did I know anyone else driving through to St. Louis that night? Should I just cancel the whole trip?

And then I remembered: There’s this van company that shuttles travelers from Columbia, Mo., to the St. Louis airport. They make a few trips a day. Sometimes, they make a stop in Kingdom City at the local McDonald’s.

I didn’t have a smartphone, but I did happen to have the shuttle company’s number stored on my phone. I called and asked when the next shuttle might be coming through Kingdom City.

It was coming in seven minutes, they said. I asked if I could pay with credit card over the phone. They told me: Forget about the credit card. Start running towards the van.

So I started running, the yellow jacket on one arm, the cooler of beer and meats and ice wheeling behind me. The lid was duct taped shut.

I beat the shuttle to the McDonald’s parking lot by a minute or two, but I was still sucking air when they pulled up. I asked the driver if I could pay by credit card. He said no. Cash only.

The exact cost of the trip is lost to memory, but I do remember that it was a slightly unusual number. I think it was $42.

I opened my wallet. I had exactly $42 inside.

So that’s how I got to St. Louis that weekend.

Was I lucky? Absolutely. Everything was going wrong. My car was dying. I was screwed. But there just happened to be a garage that could help me when I needed help. There just happened to be a St. Louis-bound shuttle coming through town when I needed it. I just happened to have the to-the-decimal-point amount of cash I needed to pay for the shuttle.

But there’s more to this story than that. I’m thinking now about this breakfast place I love. They’ve got these words inscribed on the top of their menu, and I’m rather fond of them:

Keep your eye on the donut, and not on the hole.

I love that. When things go wrong, we lose focus on what’s important. We focus on what we don’t have instead of what we do have.

I didn’t have a working car at that moment, but I did have all the tools to get me to St. Louis that weekend. That was the goal: Get to St. Louis.

I kept my eye on the donut, even as everything was going wrong. I made it to St. Louis that night.

Things tend to go wrong. This is the first in a series of blog posts about the things that I think about during those moments when the wrong things happen.

I remember the very first time that everything went wrong for me. I think I was in first or second grade. My family was up in Pennsylvania at Sesame Place, a Sesame Street-themed water park. My dad and sister and I were going down a water slide. I went down first, and waited for them to come down after me. But they never came. So I waited and waited, and then I got upset, and then first-or-second grade me started to cry, and then I got hysterical, and then I started to think I’d lost my family forever, and then dad found me and everything was fine. The whole scene — from me thinking my family had abandoned me to me finding my dad, going back on a water slide and completely forgetting about it — took five or 10 minutes in real time, and several hours in elementary school time. In the moment, it was terribly scarring, and it seemed to take forever to find my dad, and then I was over it before I’d even gotten all the way down the next slide.

Since then, I’ve been through more a few more situations where Every. Fucking. Thing went wrong. There was the time I almost got deported by the Chinese. The time I did a mile-long sprint through Houston Intercontinental in sandals. The time my mother nearly dropped the Torah during my Bar Mitzvah.

You get the idea.

But not everything is a full-on disaster. What I’m learning is, when everything goes wrong, it’s usually never as terrible as it seems in the moment. I’m learning how to put things into perspective.

This one song by John Prine helps. It’s one of my favorites, called, “That’s The Way The World Goes Round.” And the chorus goes:

That’s the way that the world goes ’round
You’re up one day and the next you’re down
It’s half an inch of water and you think you’re gonna drown
That’s the way that the world goes ’round

It’s that third line that I love the most: “It’s half an inch of water and you think you’re gonna drown.” Isn’t it almost always? I find that the worst mistakes, the biggest fuck-ups… well, they’re really not that bad at all.

It’s just that in the moment, every other thing in my mind gets blocked out, and all I can think of is how everything is going wrong. I lose all perspective.

And then I remind myself that it’s just a half an inch of water, and the moment tends to pass.