Wednesday, the hump day, started out badly.
The drive to work was no fun. C was cranky over life at 51, the cat pee on
the foil-covered couch and cat food can lids strewn about the living and
dining rooms. I got cranky at her crankiness...and my part in it, childish
though it was. At work, we parted in the lobby, opposing magnets repelled
by the close proximity.
When I finally sat down at my desk, I was in full blown snarky mode after
rerunning the tape of the morning's commute in my head. My
"justifiable" irritation with her felt good enough to hold on to until at
least 9:30, but my boss called me into his office immediately. No one, not
even the most mindblowingly confident worker in the whole wide world wants
to talk with their boss first thing. And I certainly didn't. Not after my
morning. I silently cursed my fast-acting karma.
The meeting, as it turned out, was all my fault. The day before I had
commented to my boss, D., just as he was leaving the office, that I hated
where I sat at work. It was situated in the uncool part of the building;
if it were in a restaurant (not a 4-star restaurant... but more of a
Denny's), my cube would be next to the kitchen or the bathrooms. A guy on
the other side of the cube wall swears like a sailor and coughs frequently
without covering his mouth. All of my buddies live in another part of the
building. It receives no natural light. It's located on a very busy
corridor. It 's a bad feng-shui mother of a cube.
Don't get me wrong, it's not the 7th level of hell. I can live with it...I
had lived with it for almost a year but lately but when I am snappish, I
want action. I wanted to make some change happen not just in my cubicle
but in my life, because I'd got the lingering feeling lately, that I
couldn't make things happen in my life. I was just a gal in an oarless
boat with a useless rudder. Maybe if I moved to a new cubicle, if I could
sail away from the tuberculin salty sea dog, I could better navigate my
own inner voyage. It sounded good in my head, anyway.
At the meeting, D dutifully followed up on my complaint...but as soon as I
started verbalizing it, I felt like such a heel...here I was making someone
else's day poopy because of my own sense of inadequacy. Another karma
point against me. Yippee!
Feeling every bit the problem employee after our discussion, I walked back
to my afflicted cube. It's passive-aggressivley messy, piled high with
paper and old plastic lunch containers, an ineffectual testament to my
indolence. A more motivated me would have made the odd attempt to tidy it. Today though, I was sticking with snarkyness not cleanliness.
Over my desk sits one particularly vicious florescent light. I've always
hated how it spotlights the worst aspects of my cubicle. I looked up at
it, making it the convenient focus of all my discontent, loathing, and
general grumpiness.
Nothing happened for a while. I just kind of hung out, squinting at it and
hating it. Then there was this small pop and a long, low whistle, like
someone blowing through pursed lips.
Simultaneous with the pop, the light went out. Immediately, my cube was
draped in a kind of mysterious, shadowy calm.
Now a good friend of mine, before she went back to work, was always going on about how the universe will take care of you and how asking for help (i.e. - prayer) works. Pessimist me never believed the hype, especially after said friend began suffering from the same discontents when she started working for 'the man' again. Perverse friend that I am, I found a certain satisfaction in that. It proved my theory:
*No one who must work for a living can experience magic.
*Magic doesn't happen while you are at work, magic happens only to those
people who don't need to work.
*No magic, no change. No change, no contentment. No contentment, no
motivation... just the rule of snarkiness.
But, now, I have to contend with the blinking-out of that light. It's
demise made me feel surprising better, lighter. Deprived of the ugly
light, my unhappiness feel less legitimate. I shifted to modified
annoyance. Perhaps it wasn't so bad?
Still there was the issue of C's lingering rebuff this morning. Small
conversations I had with her earlier were noncommittal. She seems upset at
me in the way people that love you but stop liking you can be. Distant,
detached. No overt displays of disdain. What did I expect? According to
my astrologer, Venus was in retrograde wasn't it? Love was retreating,
fleeing from all the most unlikely spots, taking a vacation from the long
shots; leaving the lucky couples with the heavens on their side. I'll go
talk to her after lunch...to see if I can patch things up a bit, despite
the odd celestial positions.
