February 9, 2011
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The Daily News
1 Life.2 I swear to you.
3 I won't bother you with all of it, but yeesh!
4 The good news is that I've been eating well and getting to sleep WAY early.
5 But just real stress and real stuff has been flying past at record speed.
6 Well, I guess life's just a fast game, and if you're going to beat it, you'd darned well better be able to move on your feet.
7 Moving on, Part the First: I guess I could clarify. I have a lot of people I love going through a lot of pain right now. So it isn't about me personally, but everyone I love experiencing so many real-life things. The night before last my screen door kept crashing into my front door, waking me up.
8 Normally, when it's my OWN pain, I just have this mantra which isn't too complicated. It is this: "Sleep". I repeat it until I realize that at 2 a.m. I'm not going to solve anything, because the middle of the night is an ABSURD time to worry. It will lead only to exhaustion the next day.
9 I get this, and have always gotten it.
10 Yeah, sometimes it works, but most time it doesn't.
11 The only time worrying in the middle of the night ever worked for me was when I directed plays, and it was a day or two before production.
12 But that was because built-in solutions would fly at me like hummingbirds, stop, leave a sign, and then flit off. Built-in. People who worked on Guys and Dolls might remember the time I went into the piano lab after one such night and took huge pieces of butcher paper and wrote all the solutions to the Show's challenges, wrote them down with names and everything, and posted it all around the piano lab.
13 What happened then was this: I was so nervous about that Show that I woke in the middle of the night, wrote it all down, and looked at a long list of Show notes. I went down to the school WAY early and wrote them all on the butcher paper.
14 It worked amazingly well, because instead of having a cast sit down and listen to a long speech, they just had to wander around the piano lab and look at my "billboards". A hundred or so notes happened in around four seconds, and everybody knew what they had to do.
15 I wish I had those sorts of challenges now.
16 I've been fine in the classroom lately, because yes, you DO get better with age and experience.
17 But what's been happening lately is things shaking up people I love, things that I have little control over, people who have always been there for me.
18 So I've been trying to send "particles" out there. Every night I pray for you in my own way. I am quite into coincidences and positive thinking. I have a track record a mile long of coincidences and positive forces. They don't work all the time, but if I believe anything, it's that good thoughts always help. Call them prayers or whatevz, I've seen it work.
19 I was trained by my Mom. And yeah, there are things we have utterly no control over. But throwing positive thoughts to people you love works; I truly believe that.
20 Fortunately, I have physically been all over stuff lately. Things I can control are pretty much in check, with the exception of the pilot light on my heater.
21 But I've been all over school, for example. I've been working ridiculously hard to make sure that all of that is totally under control.
22 Getting to sleep early and eating healthily has produced.
23 The other stuff I can only do what I can do, and that is to love you all.
24 Powerfully.Trust me.
25 Moving on, Part the Second: The wind chimes are gonging along. I realize it's probably just the wind, but they are louder and more musical than ever as I tack away at this stuff.
26 Moving on, Part the Third: Wow. They're really loud and musical!
27 So let's get going with the positive. Yesterday I went to Lucky's by my school. I had stayed late at school keeping up with my grading, which I have NEVER done 'til this year, and recently at that. But that got me going home a little later than I would have liked.
28 As always, I stopped at the store to pick up one or two things, and wound up with a shopping cart that easily had a hundred dollars worth of stuff.
29 When I got to the checkout, some girl on a cell phone walked right up to me and said into her phone, "Some OLD man just cut in front of me. I mean, I have ONE item and this OLD man cut right in front of me..." and she went on and on.
30 I assume that since I am so young and cute, that she didn't mean me, but my Catholic guilt got the best of me.
31 Anyone who KNOWS me knows that I always let someone go ahead of me if they have one or two items, so I was pretty annoyed, even though I knew she couldn't possibly have been referring to me. ; ) <------way cool sideways winky guy.
32 AnywayZ...
33 I stayed in the line, and was ready to give her leave to go ahead of me, but she just kept walking around complaining to anyone within earshot. I saw her hovering around this truly old guy, and still felt that she was just a complainer. If she had two items, she could have walked over to the automatic checker. Instead, she kept walking around in circles complaining that the lines were too long, instead of taking charge of her own stuff. Complete moron.
34 Meanwhile, I noticed that while I goofed on her stupidity, my own line wasn't moving at all. It was a wall.
35 They brought a new checker to the check stand next to me, and the person opening asked the gal behind me if she would like to come over to her check stand.
36 Seriously?
37 I took it with a grain of salt. My friend Gemma wrote me yesterday about how we shouldn't "sweat the small stuff", which my Mom used to embrace all the time. So I decided not to.
38 But I noticed that person going right through, as well as several others. Cell Phone Girl kept complaining instead of hopping on that train, while a few others and I stood like stone in our line.
39 The culprit? Some white lady with about a billion coupons standing there asking the lady counting the coupons stupid questions about how to get frying pans. Big old red lips. Are ya kiddin' me? It was like around 5:30 in the afternoon and she's got a huge cart of groceries, and around one coupon for each item. How thoughtful!
40 And she looked at everybody like "Hey, so who's stupid? I'M saving money, and you fools aren't!" It was ridiculous. She literally looked up over everyone's heads and smiled, instead of saying, "I'm so sorry; I didn't realize this would take so much time." Complete self-satisfaction.
41 Who DOES that? I understand the entire coupon deal, but dude! Do that on YOUR time, not during rush hour.
42 Meanwhile, Cell Phone Girl STILL walked around complaining about the lines and the delays. Are ya KIDDIN' me?
43 I finally did what I seldom do. I took my entire cart, turned, got out of the line, plunged it gently into an aisle, and walked quietly out of the store.
44 That lady and her coupons wound up saving me a bundle, well over a hundred bucks!
45 I'll BET I saved a lot more than she did.
46 Haha, "than she". English teachers. Always inconsistent with our own stuff. I actually had written, "than she" and added the "did" only after I got over my own pretentiousness.
47 Chuckle.
48 Just another day in the life.
49 I'm just glad to be here telling you this.
50 Life.
52 I swear to you.
53 Peace.
~H~
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