My first exposure to the term came in college, in the words of a friend who said, in reference to the architecture of the highrise dorms in which we all lived: "In a feng shui sense, we are all clusterfucked."

"Clusterfuck" would be an awesome band name, but like so many band names (i.e. "Cradle of Filth"), the aesthetics of the terminology are preferable to the reality they may be imagined to describe. When I tell you that I am currently embroiled in what feels remarkably like a clusterfuck, I don't mean to draw a comparison to, say, the people of Darfur, who are in a situation that renders my current inconveniences positively trivial in their impact; still, somehow, despite an awareness of my relative good fortune in the larger scheme of things, I remain terrifically bummed out.

A clusterfuck, as I understand it, refers to the tendency that bummers have to accrue once they get started. So when I was told on Friday afternoon that I would not be receiving a contract for next year in my teacher's mailbox, all the other bummers in the neighborhood -- a neighborhood, I say again, fortunately far distant from those in Darfur -- pricked up their ears and started to roll my way. Now that I'm facing the loss of the best teaching job I'll probably ever have, I also get to experience a sore throat, insomnia, torrential rain, and standing water on the floor of my car via a mysterious leak that has also affected the computer such that the little "bong bong bong" noise, which normally indicates that I've failed to fasten my seatbelt, now continues to sound even after I've turned off the motor and shut all the doors. It's been bong bong bonging for hours now. The battery will probably die. It's Sunday and my mechanic is out of town.

Clusterfuck.

At least there's my DVD player, which, though lately it has taken to spontaneously refusing to recognize the existence of discs inserted into it (alternately claiming "No Disc" and "Bad Disc"), is currently accepting them. I'm taking tomorrow off. I'm hoping it will last through then.

This too shall pass. A few years ago, I lost my first teaching job under similar clusterfucky circumstances, except that instead of having a car that freaked out I had a car that was stolen out of my driveway. Out of that sucky season came the birth of my daughter and a life that led me to a job I liked even better. So who knows? You stay alive and all kinds of interesting, though not always pleasant, shit happens.

"If you're going through Hell, keep going." --Winston Churchill