If I had anything like a soul, I might put fingers to keyboard and write a list of all the things for which I should be grateful. It’s the day before Thanksgiving after all.
But, soulless I remain, so instead I will write about people in sufficient generalities to not attract specific ire.
First, my absolutely first world, privileged, fat, dumb and happy problems. Here I sit in the soft bath of sunlight streaming through a skylight in a state of the art, certified green and excessively comfortable office building. Free Wi-Fi. Free Diet Coke. And, in fact, a free, whole, family-sized pumpkin pie beside me.
Yet, I do not feel free. I have to wait for a ride.
So, my inner whiner is thinking “Oh, poor, pitiful, me. However, shall I survive in a luxurious office, closed now for the holiday, waiting to be transported home?” Moreover, I’m not sure how I can carry my holiday groceries and my free pie to the car, once my ride does come.
It’s a thought that someone who not only saw these images in real life but took the pictures while looking at them with my own eyeballs shouldn’t actually think.
Ultimately, I will have my soft, white flanks seated upon the rich, puffed fabric of my relatively new car. I will envision if tomorrow’s dinner should have a wee panache of gourmet or just old-school holiday cooking.
If waiting for a ride is the worst of my life, I guess I do have reason to be grateful. (Not to mention, when I see the cliffs and the ocean of our chosen town, I will forget when I lived close enough to work to bike it.)
All of the above is not what I am writing about. Well, it is. I just did. Only it was an accident.
Instead, I’m writing about sweet, sweet irony and confusion of this life. The relativity that gives this post it’s title, and my theory of relativity is what makes the world go around and around. I suppose Einstein thought the same thing about his.
Every day in my universe, I have to interact with a person who makes me kind of crazy. It’s the special kind of crazy that hits that never grew up from junior high, don’t want to get picked on any more, why is life so hard adolescent scab that never quite healed.
Her gift is one of narrow vision. She’s one of those lucky people who go through life with myopia thinking their field of vision is the ultimate truth. For example, she has her own calculus for all things normal. My in-box, often filled with receipts and other non-paperclipped, letter-sized documents is NOT normal. My clothes elicit a mix of good-natured joshing with full-on criticism and laughter.
Among her offhanded remarks that hit the sullen teenage corner of my lizard brain are consistent and fairly frequent criticisms of all things on the internet but most especially any creation of content. The reader might note — these words are on the web, and I created the content.
Facebook — Silly. (Oh, and even better, Facebook causes divorce. I bet they said that about telephones when they were invented.) ‘Blogs — doesn’t read, nothing there. (I guess in any of them?) Self revelation of any kind in public — self-serving or worse mentally unstable. Smart phones — waste of money. Twitter — unknown. Comments on websites — Stupid. (OK, I might give her that one.)
Maybe I just get cranky, because she also has a lot to say about my Diet Coke and candy fixes. Probably a chemical reaction from my reliance on the richness of preservatives in my diet.
Early on up there, before I started complaining, I mentioned the irony. The irony is that today I heard about the person in her life who criticizes what she does and her choices. I’d give the examples, but, hey now, I’m avoiding the specific.
Probably worth saying my disclaimer — for the purposes of drama I made up all the shit above, not just how the words are strung together but what they are meant to mean.
So, here’s what I learned. Even the most critical people, the ones that go around opining on the right and wrong of life’s minutia. The puritans who pee on your candy and Diet Coke parade. The ones who cannot not share the negative comments and thoughts that leap into their brains. Even those folks suffer criticism.
Maybe, just maybe, the secret will be if we could all stop tell other people what to do. Of course, as I write that I am telling each and everyone one whose tired and wary eyes may fall upon this page what the fuck to do — Let it go. Stop judging and criticizing and offering stuff up to the universe that doesn’t construct anything.
Except for the extreme right wing. As far as I’m concerned, there’s always open season on those morons.
