I had a bad day today. It was not any one tragic thing that made it bad. Rather it was a bunch of annoying grown-up concerns and work bullshit that just piled ever higher and higher, and me in my sleep-deprived, hormonal state cannot even pretend to deal with it.

There was a mighty temper tantrum brewing in my belly as I cooked dinner, and I vowed that after I did the dishes I would march right upstairs, lay down in bed, listen to Jeff Buckley’s “Grace” with the lights off, and shed all those self-piteous tears that had been building up inside of me.

Yes, it’s the 34-year-old equivalent to locking yourself in the basement, listening to The Cure, and writing poetry about how misunderstood you are with candles burning.

As luck would have it, I decided to trip through the saved programs on my DVR. I was hoping for an especially angst-filled episode of “My So-Called Life,” because nothing goes better with self-pity than a healthy dose of teen-angst nostalgia.

I didn’t quite make it that far down the list, because I spied the Classics in Concert I had recorded in the recent past. I was elated. If anything could cheer me up, it’d be Elvis Costello & Ben Gibbard singing “I Will Follow You into the Dark.” I plopped right down on the floor in front of the TV, because my TV is shitty and the sound is bad. I needed to be surrounded by the sound. With my nose inches away from the screen, I turned it all the way up and listened to their two duets (they also do Elvis’ “Accidents Will Happen”) over and over and over again until I started to smile a little. Honestly, I’ve been rewinding that song for the last 43 minutes.

And you can make fun of my emo alterego and the suckiness of Death Cab for Cutie, if you want. I don’t care. I really love Ben Gibbard with the kind of detached-fanaticism I had for C. Thomas Howell (whereby I was always delighted beyond belief to come across him in Teen Beat, but never actually bought Teen Beat just to see him).

I will, however, write really bad poetry about your insensitivity and inability to understand the very core of my being.