2006-07-25
Faithless
My friend and I were talking about luck the other day.
Neither of us is lucky.
If a tire is low, it's not in a place that can be repaired and if there's a deadline that needs to be rushed, it's not one that's going to magically get pushed back to allow for the edits that you still have to do after you spell check.
I know this and I build padding into my life.
Where there should be action stacked on top of action, I make sure there's an extra hour thrown in there because I can guarantee that I'll lose it due to unforeseen and unlucky circumstances.
I have to think about getting through my day. There's no auto-piloting because if I were to assume everything to be a-ok, I would end up screwed with an awakening so rude it rivals that of any romantic comedy plot device.
So my friend and I were talking about things like attitude and luck and how maybe the two are tied together. This girl who seems so fake and so glossy is just about the luckiest person on earth.
She has a great attitude.
Despite some serious flaws, the details of which I'm not going to list, she has this attitude like everything is f-i-n-e fine.
Meanwhile, I sit hunched over my keyboard worrying that I am too fat to ever get kissed again and too stupid to ever figure out how to make Excel do what I want it to do.
I have this inborn attitude of "This is going to suck" and a macro-competitive nature that is slowly chiseling me into a concrete wall that totally disallows feeling very supportive of anything except Rosie not having any accidents during the day.
Meanwhile, this chick who I hate sits at her perfectly manicured desk and slides her voice all over her phone calls and her shitty life is somehow great; she's somehow gracious and has lunch appointments that keep her out with her husband or her friends for two midday hours.
I don't get it.
I have to force myself to go home and let the dog out and that's like, me speeding in and out of traffic and praying that I don't get paged while I'm gone because I could totally have gone earlier or later and someone, I know it, is going to say something to me about how I was gone in their moment of need.
I can't assume that underneath it all is a seething pile of childhood hurt and that she covers it up pretty ineffectively with fake niceness and sweater-sets. And why would I want to assume that? I don't want the girl to be as snarky and unfortunate as me; I want to know what she's doing to make life be so goddamn rosy and soft!
It has to be attitude.
There must be some connection between what you put into the world and what you get out of it.
Now, the weird thing is that a lot of assholes put slimy, fake things and scary manipulations into the world.
But they believe their ignorance.
They never question themselves, never ask themselves to be accountable or reflective.
This leads me to the idea that perhaps there's a lot to the clich� of ignorance and bliss.
If you can ignore how much you do or do not measure up and pretend that everything is wonderful, then at some point, it will all be wonderful.
I wish I could do that.
I wish I could just stop in my tracks and believe that nothing is more wonderful and special than me and my life. I wish I could delete all the things that led to me feeling so defensive of having to make sure that every t is crossed every time and that every i has a perfect dot.
I wish that I had true faith, even if it was faith in some stupid religion or in a scientific theory.
I know... wishing and $.75 cents will get me a Coca Cola that I can't drink because of how fat I am.
I also know that my innate way of thinking, which is pretty much faithless, is exactly why I will never be as happy as people who are idiot sons of bitches and fake, prissy-faced brown-nosers.
The ironies in all of this are too many for me to list. We all know the characters, we all know the stories and I can not the fuck figure out what else I have to do to change them from being the same as they were eight years ago only with me older and poorer and no-longer a fun and pretty party girl.
It's just nothing like I imagined life would be, you know? And not in a good way, okay?
arizonasarah at 4:41 p.m.