Category: life

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@ The Post Office

I went to the post office today. It was just after lunch when the post office lady (I think her name is Donna) was retrieving the mail from the authentic looking blue postal collection box just outside of the front door. I walked past her with a nod of my head, as I usually do, but I’m unsure if she saw me.

She was talking with another lady as they traveled together out of the post office. The other woman had a sheaf of envelopes in her hand, of various shapes and sizes, leading me to believe she had just checked her postal box for the day. They were conversing animatedly with each other like they were old friends, so I didn’t interrupt.

As I settled in at the counter to wait for her imminent return another gentleman came in after me. I also nodded at him, as is my wont in situations such as those, and he inclined his head in return. It’s a guy thing. He was an older fellow, with a white beard that didn’t at all remind me of Santa Claus. And even though this is a small town, I don’t believe I had ever seen him before, a rarity that was worth noting at the time, and then later.

We struck up a minimal conversation about the heat in the place, a standard placeholder, while we waited a few moments for Donna to return to the counter. She breezed back in, closing the inner door behind her. A slight whiff of cinnamon followed in her wake. I stood sentinel at the vinyl counter as she came around from the back and settled back into her place. It reminded me of a hairdresser returning to her styling chair, looking slightly out of place until she is standing there again with scissors in her hand. Continue reading “@ The Post Office”

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Six For Saturday

It’s funny how we all have interactions with others every day, and some of those interactions stick in our minds while others just drop right out the moment they’re over. Most times it’s odd the things that stick, and we’re stuck standing still wondering why what we thought was important disappeared. Of course it might … Continue reading Six For Saturday

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Closing Time

ktflkda-l_i_get_awesome“So gather up your jackets, move it to the exits. I hope you have found a friend. Closing time. Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.” -Semisonic

You know how it is at the end of the night (or the early morning in some cases), when you’re so tired you can barely hold your eyes open, but you know you have to somehow make it home, so you do. You don’t remember how you got home, but you woke up in the late morning hour with a hangover and a dreadfully hazy recollection of the night before. Perhaps you even have a text sitting on your phone from someone you don’t know, or at least not that you remember anyway, and their words hint at the two of you being best friends. You scratch your head and chalk it all up to the drinking, telling yourself you won’t get that drunk again.

But it’s a vicious cycle: the partying, the staying up until all hours, the random people you co-opt into being your “friends” for the night, and always the alcohol permeating everything else. I should know. I used to live that lifestyle. It was called my late teens. For some people it’s their entire twenties. For others it’s still going on now, and for those people I have a wealth of sympathy. It can be enticing, to get that buzz, to lose your inhibitions and do things you wouldn’t do sober, but it has its consequences. Believe me. Why do you think AA is so pervasive in our society? People want to stop, but it’s so difficult.

I’ll tell you a story. It was one night just like many others during that time period for me, when we had gone out drinking, then stumbled to somebody’s house (not sure who lived there, actually, even to this day), and the drinking picked up again. There was beer, and wine coolers, and hard liquor, and grain alcohol, and pretty much anything else you could think of. Sometime along the way I had gotten that pleasant, warm feeling that made me feel invincible. I called it my Superman buzz. It made me the life of the party. Continue reading “Closing Time”

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What Men Don’t Do

man_vacuumingNearly fifteen years ago there was a movie called What Women Want that saw Mel Gibson shed his chauvinistic ways when he begins hearing women’s thoughts. It teaches him that women are sentient creatures too, and they deserve to be understood and appreciated for that. It also shows him that perhaps his way of always doing things isn’t such a good path to take when it comes to dealing with women, and with the things he thought defined him as a man as well.

Often men are generalized, but those generalizations come from a vast majority of them actually being a particular way. How often have you known a guy who won’t ask for directions no matter how lost he is? When was the last time you saw a man cry in public? Can you count on more than one hand the men you know who would skip a sporting contest to go to the ballet because the woman he loves wants to go? Perhaps you know some men who are the exceptions, but here’s a list of some generalizations that generally stay true.

What men don’t do:

  1. Admit when they’re wrong
  2. Know when to give up
  3. Accept their faults
  4. Wash their hands
  5. Plan their wedding
  6. Act their age
  7. Talk about their feelings Continue reading “What Men Don’t Do”
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Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

harvardThere’s a young man going to Harvard who had a 4.0 GPA last semester. That’s no surprise, as Harvard is one of the top universities in the country, and it takes someone with superior academic ability to even be accepted. The surprise is that this young man was born and raised in a trailer park, to a single mother who had him when she was a teenager.

This young man went to public schools all his life, and walked a mile to get to the bus stop every morning, but he never let any of that stop him, and he never felt like he had to apologize for it either. Instead, he broke the cycle and is in the process of making something of himself. Why should that be so surprising? Because unlike so many others, he believes in being other than what he was. He believes in a future of his own choosing, not the one he was born into.

Self-fulfilling-Prophecy

“A self-fulfilling prophecy is a prediction that directly or indirectly causes itself to come true, by the very terms of the prophecy itself, due to positive feedback between belief and behavior.” -adapted from the theories of Robert K. Merton

I liken it to the placebo effect, whereupon a person feels the effects of a drug they didn’t actually take because they believe they did take it. It’s all in how you approach your life, not in how others see you. That’s one of the major problems in society, the feeling that everyone else knows us better than we know ourselves. Too often we give in to peer pressure, to the ideas of everyone else about who we are, and about where we’re going in life. But it’s not about them and their views. It’s about how we envision our lives, and we can’t afford to forget it. Continue reading “Self-Fulfilling Prophecy”

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For Better or For Worse

Wedding Like Pictures 003
A wedding is only the beginning.

Every marriage has its ups and downs. You know how the wedding vows go. “For richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, for better or for worse, ’til death do us part.” Often times we deal with the richer or poorer aspect. You lose a job and you both have to adjust. Or she wants to start her own business and you are supportive. The sickness and health part of the deal is also fairly consistent, since as human beings we get sick, and our partner is there to take care of us, but it can also apply to major illnesses that we might not have prepared ourselves for, the ones that suddenly spring up and we deal with them. Because that’s what we do once we’ve entered into the contract of marriage, right? It’s right there in the vows. But the biggest one, and of course the one that’s also the most vague, is the one about for better or for worse. What does that really mean?

I got married 10 1/2 years ago, so I’m a little cloudy on exactly what was said during our wedding ceremony (please don’t kill me, honey), but I’m certain our vows were pretty much like the ones I outlined above. And  I know we’ve definitely gone through the “for better or for worse” part. I also know there’s more of both to come, and I’m more than okay with that. I’m of the opinion that you should always go into anything you do with both eyes open, but if you happen to slip up and close one of them, once it’s open again you figure out where you are and where you’re going. You don’t bail just because it’s not what you thought it was going to be. Who knows? It might end up being better than you thought it would be.

Let me get this out of the way first: I come from a divorced home, and I myself have been divorced, so I know what it’s like when there is more “worse” than “better,” when people can’t reconcile themselves to those vows and there is no other recourse. I don’t judge either of those dissolutions because I know there were extenuating circumstances in both. I judge myself for that initial marriage in the first place. It was something that should never have happened, but the divorce itself was a righteous one. My parents’ relationship, too, was irreconcilable, and although that was sad for me at the time, and on some level I’ve never gotten over it, I know that it was best for both of them in the end.

I’ve never been the best at relationships, and for a long time I blamed my dad for that. I wouldn’t get too attached to people because I always worried they would leave me high and dry. So, being distant was a state of existence for me. Continue reading “For Better or For Worse”