1) I was turned down by a job I really really wanted.
2) I was hauled into the director's office at my present job and called on the carpet for being sick so much. I was also asked to guarantee that I wouldn't be sick for the next few months. I said, no. Not sure what the underlying message was, but I think it might be a five-letter word that starts with F and ends with D.
3) I visited my parents over the weekend, where my mother cried pretty much the entire time. While she is now cancer-free, she is still recovering from two brutal surgeries and her emotions and hormones are out of whack. Feeling inadequate and unable to do more, I cooked. Lots and lots of food. Hey, you can never have too much chili in hard times.
4) My husband and I filed our taxes. We owe the government around $7000. Long story.5) We are suddenly in a lot of debt. Case in point--after running a bunch of errands this morning, I arrived back home, sweaty and gross and needing to get ready for work (which, if you were paying attention to #2, you'll know I'm on the verge of getting F***D), only to find a pink slip shoved in the door. Pink slips of any kind are never good, so a shiver of dread ran down my spine as I picked it up and read that the village had shut off our water for not paying the bill.
6) I took a very freezing cold sink bath with a couple gallons of bottled water. Did you know how much water we use just to wash our hands and to brush our teeth??? No wonder people in the 19th century never bathed--it wasn't because they feared catching cold, it's because it was a pain in the ass.
7) As I was getting dressed, my 12 year old cat who probably has some kind of kidney issue (but we can't take her to the vet because of #5) peed on the bed in front of me.
8) There was a ton of construction on the beginning of my drive to work (see #2) and more construction at the end of my drive to work. I could just see those guys standing there with their SLOW signs and their orange vests, mocking me as I banged my palms against the steering wheel.
Something funny happened in the midst of all this. As I was applying makeup to my freshly-scrubbed-in-freezing-bottled-water face, I started laughing. Like a lunatic. This is my life, but if it were a novel, some editor would tell me that I had too many bad things happening in the first chapter and I'd need to lighten up if I didn't want to lose readers with my portrayal of human misery.
Can things get any worse than this? Probably. But here's the thing: I know it will get better. Not because of some law of physics, what goes up must come down, blah blah blah. But because I just know. I have faith that things are going to turn around.
I could very well be insane, as my maniacal laughter might suggest this morning, while I tried to apply a straight line of eyeliner. A friend of mine recently asked how I can emotionally cope with all this, and in part it's because I have that faith, the sense that I'm not alone. It's not necessarily faith in a higher being who's looking out for me. Maybe there is one of those; admittedly I sometimes feel it. On a more karmic level, however, I know I'm working hard to put good into the world, and it will eventually come back to me, right? Yes, at times I feel like I must have been a murderer or a kitten torturer in a past life to account for all this bad karma right now. But generally? I know I'll be okay.
Faith or fancy? You decide. Just be kind if you find me in a corner eating my hair.
By the way, my husband paid the water bill. I can't wait for a hot shower tonight.
