Friday, November 25, 2011

Sacred Negativity

I would like to say Thank You to all of my readers!  I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving and I hope that we are all able to find ways to be thankful every day!
Please excuse the type font on the last paragraph of this blog.  It's being dumb for some reason.
Quotes:
I love the random quotes I find written in my notebooks.  Here are a few that I found while going through things.
“I’m not a waif any more.  I’m a waffle with a side of bacon.”
“Writing is not what you do, it’s who you are.”
“Create from love.”
One of my journal entries begins: “I’m considering doing another cleanse,” and ends with “this afternoon Chinese for lunch, yeah!”  
“I’ve got doughnut love in my belly.”
“I’m no longer a hot donut virgin.”
“I think my doughnut loves me.” 

Tasty Tidbit #1: Save the Cheese!
          It’s 11:30 a.m. on Wednesday the 23rd of November and I walk into my house after running last minute errands for Thanksgiving.  I go into the kitchen to put away the groceries and when I reach into the fridge, it’s warm.  That’s right folks; my fridge took a crap the day before Thanksgiving.  I call my landlord, no answer.  I call the emergency line, no answer.  I try to take a deep breath as the realization comes to me that no one is going to answer, because everyone is getting ready for their Thanksgiving.  My mind grapples with what to do next.  We have a freezer in the basement, but it’s not plugged in and it probably needs cleaned.  When I check the freezer part of the fridge the tater tots have turned to squish and my frozen fish, not so frozen.  My guess is that the fridge actually went out sometime in the middle of the night.  I tell Ben that the fridge is broken and that we need to get the freezer cleaned out and break out the coolers to save what we can.  That’s when things got a bit ugly.  He was playing his computer game and he asked me if he could finish what he was working on.  He said that if the fridge was already warm a few extra minutes wouldn’t matter.  Stupid me, I said okay.
          Now, I need to clarify.  I said okay, because I didn’t know what else to say, my brain did a misfire.  I mean who says that?  Hey dear I know things are totally screwed up right now but do you mind if I finish working in my pixilated world first?  Hell yes I mind.  It took a couple minutes for my brain to catch up to what he said and my response.  By the time it did I was pissed off and I let him know it.  Of course that confused the hell out of him.  One second the wife is saying it’s okay the next she is in my face.  After a good round of fighting, he left to go get the ice and I went down stairs.  I was transferring some food that could be temporarily frozen to the freezer in the basement.  It was while I was cleaning it out that I had my revelation of what the hell did he just say and what the hell did I just say.  Funny how cleaning tends to clarify things.  Anyway, I had just taken a small load of cheese (we’re from Wisconsin we love our cheese) downstairs when a part of me just crashed.  Looking at it now it reminds me of a computer crashing.  I have a couch downstairs that used to be at the shop that I worked at.  I took one look at that couch and crashed.  I just flopped onto the couch.  I was done. 
          I stayed there until Ben got back with the ice.  In fact I stayed there until I was good and ready to get up.  That wasn’t very long but it felt good to just take myself out of the equation for a few moments.  After we had the coolers set up we had a little talk about his response and my response.  He explained that he was completely confused by the way I had responded, being okay one minute and pissed the next.  I explained that I understood why he was confused, but that I didn’t understand how he could ask the question in the first place.  A truce was called and we realized we had both responded poorly to the situation.  As of this writing we still don’t have a working fridge, nor have I heard from anyone on when I might be getting a new one.  At least we saved the cheese. 

*I thought I should note that despite the fridge breaking down we still had a good Thanksgiving.  The turkey was just fine as was everything else.  I guess it worked out that I waited until the last minute to buy everything for our Thanksgiving meal. 

Tasty Tidbit #2: Because if I don’t write it, it will drive me crazy
          I debated and debated and am still debating whether or not I want to write this tidbit.  The main reason for the debate is because it pertains to a situation with one of my readers and a second main reason (can you have two?)  is because I don’t want to appear unprofessional.  This tidbit, however refuses to be unwritten, in fact I finished the main body of the blog before turning back to this part.  In the end I suppose it comes back to my blog, period.  I just don’t like it when things tug on me and won’t let go, so I’ll just write the damn thing and have some relief.
          Last week I got a call from someone I know that has a job opening up next month.  I was thrilled.  No that’s not right, I was literally jumping up and down with excitement at the mere possibility.  I had come home from school that day fried.  I told Ben that I was done with school and that I was going to look for a job.  Less than five minutes after this declaration the phone rang.  Of course, I didn’t expect this person to hire me outright, in fact I wanted to go through the proper channels, resume, interview all that.  I wanted to be professional; it’s just a little weird when you know the person looking at possibly hiring you.  Anyway, I asked him if I could turn in my resume by the end of the week and he said that would be fine.  I wrote it out, was reasonably satisfied at the time and turned it over to him. 
          It was when I was driving home that the doubts started coming in and I made a couple discoveries.  One, I had difficulty putting the dates on my resume because between all the moves I’ve lost much of my paper work.  Although I was reasonably confident I had gotten close to or was on target for my dates of past employment I was concerned that something might be off.  What if he thought I was lying?  Should I call him and tell him?  I decided against that.  I wanted to maintain a level of professionalism and calling him up and going hey by the way was not professional in my eyes.  
          Next I realized that most of my work history was from Wisconsin.  That’s not a problem.  The problem is my last name.  I wasn’t married in Wisconsin so if they were calling to check on my work history no one was going to know Sara Pulvermacher, because that wasn’t my last name.  I could have kicked my own ass.  Again I debated the phone call and again I decided against it.  My last employers in Wisconsin knew I was getting married and I hoped that my two supervisors, both whom I had good relationships, would make the connection.
          Last but not least I forgot to put my education.  I admit that when I was typing out my resume it popped in my head but at the time I remember thinking how am I going to put that I’ve been going to school off and on for the last six years and don’t have a degree.  I can apply for my associate’s degree, but since I didn’t know I wasn’t returning to school until five minutes before he called and I don’t have the degree in had I felt it wasn’t right to put it on the resume. 
          These things plagued me and are still plaguing me.  I had wanted so badly to present myself professionally and put my best foot forward and it felt like the ultimate fail.  I am probably being too hard on myself but it felt even more important to present myself well since this is a friend.  You don’t want to fail on a friend.  Whether I get hired or not is not the point.  I just wish I had managed to present a more professional me.  I can write fiction or blogs all day long but telling all the wonderful things about me in a resume is hard enough, forgetting some of the most important points is just a kick in the pants.  It’s one of those times where I have to sigh and remember to keep loving me for who I am, even if that person is a bit of a flake.   

Sacred Negativity

          Ah, life.  You have to love it and all the wonderful lessons that come your way.  Okay, so I admit that I don’t always love the lessons I receive.  Sometimes it feels like the Universe is slapping me in the face over and over again and I have no idea why.  The crazy thing is when you realize that the slap in the face isn’t a slap at all, it’s probably more like a pat on the head but until you change your perspective you just feel like you’re being beat like a red-headed stepchild.  Lately, I’ve been getting smacked.  This semester, sorry I think in school terms, has been a real pain in my ass.  I feel like I’ve been jumping through hoops, dealt with rejection, screwed up schedules and smacked around by depression.  All in all I would vote that I never have to relive this semester again.  Or I would have voted that until last week, when I made one of my little discoveries.
          I had waited all day to go to my poetry class.  Please understand that parking is so bad at APSU that I get to school at 7 am, even though my class doesn’t start until 12:45 pm.  It’s the only class I have on Tuesday’s and Thursday’s which makes me not a fan of either day.  As I’ve mentioned in this blog before my poetry class has been pretty soul crushing.  When I walked into class there were only two people there.  They let me know that the professor had cancelled class for the week.  I had missed the week before and when I emailed my professor he said that he would let me know what the assignment for Tuesday would be.  Well here I am on Tuesday, standing there like an idiot, having waited all day for a class that was cancelled.  Apparently he had also split us into pairs and my partner had not contacted me like she was supposed to.  The two women that were there suggested that I stick around for a few minutes to see if my partner showed up.  I ungraciously agreed to stay.  A few minutes later another woman, who I honestly have to call a girl, came into class.  This is the same girl who takes up three quarters of the table, talks non-stop, and even though there is a good two foot space between our chairs still manages to bump into my chair, every class.  Guess who my partner is? 
          I’m not happy. My time has been wasted and now, damn it, I have this chick as my partner, really?  Do you hate me God?  My partner explains our assignment to me, and suggests that we work on it today since we are both here.  Really? No kidding.  We have to go over all of each other’s poems from the semester, so ten in all.  We have to comment and make suggestions, point out patterns, that kind of thing.  As I feel that I suck at poetry, I don’t feel that I can give this girl too much help but I do my best.  My generally kick ass memory helps me to remember many of the suggestions that the professor had made about her poetry.  By the end of the normal class period we manage to get through all the poems, which means we don’t have to come back on Thursday.  We’ve managed to create a day off for ourselves. 
          I’m walking back to my Jeep when that little inspirational light bulb finally clicks on.  I honestly believe that I can hear my angels and guides sighing with relief when the light turns on.  Like, finally she got it!  My team needs a raise.  Anyway, as I’m walking to the Jeep I remember that the night before I had been telling my husband how much I didn’t want to go to soul crushing poetry class.  It was so hard for me to go in and be torn apart.  I’m bad at poetry, I get it.  I told Ben, “It would be so cool if he would cancel class.”  DUH!  I asked for it, I got it.  I just missed the memo somewhere in there.  I got another week without being in poetry class!  I realized that something that had looked negative had turned into something fantastically positive.  And though she might be annoying at best, my partner was efficient, complimentary, and got the work done. 
          I sat in my Jeep mulling this over.  It occurred to me that there had been a few things over the past week or so that had turned out the same way.  They had looked negative, but they had all turned out to be positive.  Usually when something negative happens I try to remember things like, it’s happening for a reason or I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be, but this was something new.  Instead of seeing the event as negative, I felt I needed to see it as a positive.  Catching myself was the challenge.  Like most people when something “negative” happens I immediately react.  I judge the situation for what it looks like on the surface without too much thought and react from that point.  When I got home I tried to make a list of all the things I perceived as “negative” and their actual outcome.  The list was quite a wakeup call and I thought I should give another example just because I can.
          Last Thursday, I went to a midnight showing with a couple friends.  This was a huge movie and the theater wasn’t showing anything but this movie that night.  Sixteen screens of the same movie, which means of course that the parking lot was full.  I managed to find the last parking spot over in Timbuktu.  I wasn’t real happy about that.  It was cold and the thought of having to walk eight miles to get to my car at two in the morning was not a happy thought either, but I was at the midnight showing and with my friends so get over it. 
          After the movie was over, hundreds of people were pouring out of the theater trying to get to their cars.  I managed to get to mine pretty quick and when I got there the three people parked around me all pulled out at roughly the same time, making a perfect hole for me to get through and I got out of the theater the back way.  I was home and in bed before either of my friends even made it out of the parking lot and I live about twenty minutes from the theater!  So much for bitching about a parking space.  When I wrote this one on my list I realized how perfect it was that I parked so far away.  The people who had close parking spaces or had parked in the middle had gotten caught between all the people going to their cars and the traffic itself. 
          As I examined my list I realized a couple of things.  Number one I needed to look at things a bit closer.  Instead of just seeing what’s on the surface, “I had to park far away,” I need to look at things to see what’s underneath, “by parking all the way over here I have a better chance of getting out easily.”  Along with that I need to stop judging and reacting to a situation without even thinking about it.  That one made me think about creating from default.  Instead of consciously creating many people just create from default, but that’s a whole other blog.  I needed to stop jumping to conclusions about the things happening around me and take a breath before I freak out.  I need to act not react.  Another thing that I realized is that the majority, and who knows it might be everything, of the negative things that happened to me turned out to be very positive, though I might not see the reason right away.
          So this is my lesson right now.  Stop the judging, act don’t react, and look for the positive because trust me it’s there.  Be open to the experience instead of closing yourself off immediately when it looks like it might be a bad or negative thing.  I like to use the kaleidoscope example, but that’s just because I have a thing for kaleidoscopes.  Right now as I look through at all the beautiful fragments that form my life I see situations as this is exactly where I am supposed to be or everything happens for a reason.  If I turn the wheel just a little bit I see a whole new pattern emerge and it’s even more beautiful than the one before it.  Now I can begin to see the positive purpose behind every event that occurs in my life.  Though I am still working on this lesson I think it might be one of the most beautiful I have ever been presented.  It’s a learning opportunity like no other.  I know I’m not going to be perfect, I completely freaked about the fridge breaking although I did catch myself, I know I will get better with practice.  It makes me feel so excited to wonder what beauty I will see on the next turn of the wheel. 

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