When it rains, it certainly does seem to pour. Truer words have never been spoken. On from this drizzle that has been chilling us and on to the torrential monsoons of life.

My monsoon hit me early Sunday. It was a little after 10 a.m. and I was driving to one of the three places I work on Sundays.

While I was crossing a bridge on I-235, going roughly 70 mph (yes, I was speeding), my car suddenly started shaking ferociously. About two minutes later I was off the interstate and parked in some abandoned lot on 8th Street in Des Moines. I got out of my car and discovered the culprit. My rear, driver’s side tired was completely flat.

Well, quite honestly, exploded is a better description. My tire had not just one, but two gaping holes on either side of it. The phrase I told my brother on the phone was, “Yeah, it’s dead.” Or even massacred.

Thankfully in about 20 minutes my brother was there to help me and attempt to teach me how to put the idiot spare I had on my car. Everything looked promising until we discovered we were missing the tool for the center lock on the tire. My car is foreign with foreign tires. Without this tool that tire just was not coming off. We thought maybe Wal-Mart would have it.

So my brother and I trekked across the street to the wonderful world of Wal-Mart. They did not have the tool. With no other options, we bought a couple of tools and hoped we could work some magic.

But since Halloween has passed and Harry Potter is not coming out for another couple of weeks, there was no magic in the air. We gave up on the tire so that I could make it to at least two of my jobs.

As luck would have it my brother had recently fixed my old, piece-of-crap Dodge. I was going to have a car after all. Woohoo!

Of course I am sure you can tell by the early events of Sunday that luck was just not on my side.

I drove my old Dodge from my parents’ house to work. The drive is roughly 10 minutes. In that short time frame the thermostat rose two notches above the halfway mark. Call me crazy but that is a quick jump for a mere 10 minutes.

I kept thinking, how in the heck am I going to get this car to Ames?

The pretty obvious answer is that I wasn’t. It would likely cost more to tow the heap of junk than it is actually worth. Plus, I would end up stranded on the side of the road and then would not be able to make it to my third job of the day.

My mother was the one who talked me out of driving the Dodge to Ames.

I eventually just let her drop me off, leaving me vehicle-less for approximately two days. Any college kid knows that is an eternity. For the better part of the day I was determined that the old Dodge and I were going to chug it up to Ames like the little engine that could.

Needless to say, Sunday’s events elevated my stress levels considerably. Throw on top of the issue of no car all my tests, work, extracurriculars and even some attempts at the dating game, and you have a time bomb with legs, wandering around campus ready to explode at any given moment. It could be as devastating as a nuclear attack; I am a terrorist’s best weapon.

Recently I was told you can burn up to 200 calories an hour by batting your head against the desk, walls, etc. If that is true, I burned more than 1,500 calories Sunday by pounding my head on random surfaces. Over the last couple of days that number has at least doubled.

When things get bad, I always like to think they cannot possibly get any worse. I am almost always wrong, though, and this time was no exception. On Monday I found out my extra key that I left with my brother does not open my trunk, which is where we stored the jack and the spare tire on Sunday. The only key that would open the trunk was here in Ames, and I had no car to drive it down to Des Moines. Yes, I burned a few more calories when I got this tragic news.

Apparently things can get worse. I just hope they don’t. Perhaps soon this monsoon will pass. Tomorrow is a brand new day — perhaps it will be better. Well, it can’t possibly get any worse. Oh, wait…

Ayrel Clark

is a sophomore in journalism

and mass communication from Johnston. She is the opinion editor of the Daily.