Sans Fig Leaf
w
"Tragedy of errors"
22 March, 2007
My to-do list didn’t seem difficult. Just a few errands and household tasks before I sat down to do some writing while Michael was at work. First up was making coffee, which would facilitate everything else.
Except before I could make coffee I needed to rinse out the pot and dump the old grounds from the previous pot. The grounds go into the compost bin. I keep a collection dish in the kitchen to hold the old grounds while I set up the pot, the idea being that I'll carry the old ones out once the pot gets going. I had to move some dirty dishes out of the way to get to the holding dish--only to discover that there were two sets of grounds in the dish already.
So I needed to take all the grounds out to the compost bin before the pile got any more ridiculous. But it was cold and rainy outside, so I needed to put on something more than the comfy old cotton shorts I was wearing, and find my slip-on shoes. I went to get those and discovered some clothes that hadn't made it into the hamper. I put those away, then headed back to the kitchen.
And realized that because I'd been distracted I hadn't grabbed my shoes. I couldn't find them where I expected when I went back. While searching for them I realized I hadn't taken my morning meds yet, so I stopped to do that, which led me back downstairs to deal with my vitamins, after which I went back upstairs for the shoes.
Having finally gotten the coffee grounds dumped into the compost bin, I came back inside and emptied the dishwasher so I could put the dirty dishes that had been in the way into the dishwasher. I set it running and finally, forty-five minutes after I set out to make a pot of coffee, I started the coffee pot.
The frightening thing: it usually doesn't go this smoothly. Sometimes I wonder how I get anything done at all.
You can laugh and envision my life playing out as a Three Stooges skit, but it will be a hollow laugh. Because I bet that you get tangled up in similar situations more often than you would like to admit. Because everyone occasionally gets caught in the "just one more thing" or "while I'm at it" cycle.
Sometimes it's very serious, such as the guy I knew who wouldn't exercise because his knees hurt, and his knees hurt because he had a weight problem, and he had a weight problem because he didn't exercise and didn't know how to cook, so about three-quarters of his caloric intake came from soda pop and junk food.
Other times it's merely exasperating, like a home repair project. We start out planning to replace a door, but when we get it apart, we discover that the frame needs some work, and when we dig into that we find out that there's some rot behind the wall, and when we get into that we find a leaking pipe, and when we get into that...
Well, you get the picture.
Other times its just sad, such as another guy I knew who insisted that all jobs are awful, because every job he'd had was awful. He was right about the second part; as far as I could tell, every job he'd had had been rotten in more than one way. But it didn't seem to be that it was merely a case of bad luck. Because he had a chip the size of Texas on his shoulder.
What I mean by that is, whenever anything went wrong, he took it personally. If someone did something foolish, even if it didn't directly effect him, he took it personally. When it did directly interfere with something he was trying to do, he took it extremely personally. And he held grudges.
He wasn't grim and depressed. He laughed a lot, but always while telling stories about how foolish other people were. But he was angry--all the time.
And that's why all of his jobs were awful. I'm not saying that he made every job awful. Many, if not most, of the workplaces that took him on were screwed up long before he got there.
Work places that don't completely suck (and they do exist), are usually that way because some of the folks doing the hiring are astute enough to notice something like a chip the size of Texas on the shoulder, and decline to hire the person. So they wind up at another workplace that doesn't know how to spot people with bad attitudes. Because several people with bad attitudes (and other problems) get hired there, it's a very dysfunctional workplace.
Everytime he got hired at a place like this, it provided more proof that all workplaces and nearly all people are awful. Which just made his attitude worse, and so on and so on.
Which isn't to say that all the bad things that happened to him were his fault. Some of his actions put him in a position more likely than not to encounter the bad. They also made him less likely to notice the good things.
Just because we don't notice the good things doesn't mean they aren't there. The good and the bad will keep happening, no matter what. The important thing isn't whether good or bad things happen to us--some of both happens to everyone. It's about how we perceive them, what we decide they means, and what we decide to do about them.
--John Lennon
.