Started out full of optimism.
A brand new president.
Aretha got a new hat.
Speechifying…and stuff.
But ended with pessimism. Oh is the learning curve on this new job bending me in new directions. But it’s a good job and the new President said we all have to work harder.
Well.
No choice but to end the day with the fruit of Napa Valley.
Then go to bed, and try again tomorrow.
Today was a particularly tough day for me to roll out of bed with the alarm and come to work.
I didn’t sleep well last night due mainly to the crazed feline. I have a friend who has a theory that occasionally the cat brain will release some hormone that is akin to kitty crack, which then is the reason for the dilated eyes and tendency to gallop around the house making crazed movements.
If that is true, then my personal feline got deep into the kitty crack at about 3:30 in the ayem, and is, today, my least favorite person in the world.
Sleepy eyed, I ventured out onto the highway to make my way into my place of employment. I was heartened to see the sun slanting over the hills with the promise of a really warm day. This never fails to cheer me.
But that smile turned into a snarl when I made the merge and found myself rolling behind this.
Click for full size if you can’t make it out. If you can make it out, what you see there is a Forerunner with two surfboards sticking out the back.
Dude driving and his long-haired blond lady in the passenger seat are headed, I assume, to Pacifica for a nice day of surfing.
While I drive to work to sit under florescent lights all day and literally watch my muscles lose their elasticity. In a building located in what is considered one of the most foggy and windy areas of the Bay Area.
And this is fair how?
I remember as a kid, and especially a teenager, being really, really into music. I still am, but it was something most vital to me back then. An escape, a place to speak emotions and thoughts I didn’t have the words or maturity to say. It spoke to my soul.
And I remember my grandmother or mother or some adult making a comment about the music that mattered to me, and thinking, “they just don’t get it.”
I recall swearing to myself, SWEARING that I wouldn’t let there be that generation gap as I got older.
And I’ve fought it. Hard. I listen to current music. I do my best to stay up to date, so I’m at least conversant.
Yesterday, I was listening to my iPod on the way home from work, and the shuffle landed on a Rihanna song.
I like Rihanna. I like her a lot, actually. I think she’s not only stunningly beautiful, but she’s talented.
The song that came on is entitled “Unfaithful.”
In the song, the story goes that the woman is with a guy, and that it’s more than love, he is “The reason that the sky is blue.”
But gosh darn it all, she just can’t seem to stay true to him.
She cries out, “And I know that he knows I’m unfaithful/And it kills him inside/To know that I am happy with some other guy/I can see him dying.”
She then wraps up the chorus with, “I don’t wanna be…/A murderer.”
Ok, ok, this is all very emotional. Her cheating is “killing” him. He’s “dying inside” and she is the “murderer” for doing this to him.
And this is when the yawning chasm that is the generational gap became oh so apparent and the years of my experience in this thing called life kicked in.
I found myself, listening closely to the words, and then *yelling* at my stereo:
“THEN LEAVE HIM! IF THERE IS NO WAY YOU WON’T CHEAT AND IT PAINS YOU TO SEE HIM ‘DYING INSIDE’ THEN BE A GROWN UP AND WALK AWAY!!!”
Ahem.
Yeah.
Sure, I know that, “He’s a nice guy but I just can’t be true to him and so I did the mature thing and broke up with him so I could go sow my wild oats, knocking boots with everything that walks so that one day I can be a sad, bitter old hag wondering whatever happened to my life and why I never found a nice guy,” doesn’t really make for fun, emo deep pop songs.
And I’m fairly certain that the young twentysomethings that work for me would roll their eyes and think, “she just doesn’t get it.”
I think I just grew a new gray hair.
“Hey you kids, get off my lawn!!!”
This weekend, The Good Man and I met some friends up in Sausalito for fun and merriment.
Getting to Sausalito means traversing the beautiful Golden Gate Bridge.
I believe this year makes twelve years for me living here in the Bay Area and driving across that big orange bridge is still as exciting as it was the first time I ever did it.
I have about a zillion photos I’ve taken of the Golden Gate Bridge, because no matter how many times I see it, I always find something more interesting I need to try to capture.
Then sometimes, like yesterday, I decide to come out from behind the camera and just watch as we drive by. The art deco uprights are still so endlessly fascinating to me, the way the light plays off of them, the subtle texturing. The stout cables that hold it all in place still look like dental floss in perspective of all the iron and steel and concrete that make up the bridge.
I wondered, as we drove across, if the men who finished the bridge back in 1937 could ever fathom what it this bridge would become. Could they have ever imagined the magnitude of traffic that rolls over it every day?
And how freaking cool that something built 72 years ago still stands tall and proud and virtually unrevised (but for some retrofitting and upgrading) since then.
I got to thinking, was there anything from my life in New Mexico that could even come close to this? Something that in driving by with some frequency, I still have the sense of awe and wonder every time I see it?
The closest I got was not a man made item. First thought in my head was Tijeras Canyon. Similar in that it is a roadway to transport people from one side of a great geological obstacle to another.
It still fills me with awe at the beauty and wonder at the too fast development growing in that gap between the Sandias and the Manzanos.
I tried to think if there was something like this, something man made and yet so enduring. Of course, the Indian ruins are far older than the Golden Gate, but not something that one drives by with frequency, as they tend to be back in the hills.
I suppose the most awe inspiring bit of human engineering and transportation in New Mexico is the Sandia Peak Tramway.
I don’t know, to my New Mexico friends, do you have any ideas? I’m sure I’m forgetting something…
Photo by Karen Fayeth
Last night, after coming home late, and looking for something to accompany my dinner of hot soup, I watched some throwaway episode of some throwaway show in syndication.
The premise of the episode was that just one little thing can change the outcome of your whole day. It was a riff on the Butterfly Effect complete with a CG butterfly.
I actually thought it was a clever bit of television writing, and it was highly satisfying, along with my chicken soup.
This morning, I had occasion to revisit this bit of chaos theory as I made my way into work.
I left the house a skosh later than I’d wanted to, and when I fired up the Jeep, the gas indicator began making noises at me. I had to stop for gas, making me run even later.
The closest gas station is located on a road out of town that I don’t usually take, because along that road there are three schools. The parents dropping off their kids always backs up traffic, so I avoid it.
But that wasn’t the worst of it. In addition to running later than usual, and running into school traffic by taking a road I normally don’t take, it turns out there was a traffic light blinking at the most critical intersection (right before the highway entrance). So traffic on that road was backed up for about five miles.
And because I sat for an hour on a road that should normally take ten minutes to traverse, I got to work much later than usual, meaning I had a hard time finding a parking spot. The one I did find was a tight squeeze by a wall in the parking garage, and so I dinged my own door on the way out.
It also means the work cafeteria was out of orange juice by the time I got there.
And my staff gave me an arched eyebrow when I did finally roll into my office.
All this really bodes for a great day, right? Ugh.
So as I sit here at my desk drinking coffee instead of OJ, I got to thinking about how just one little thing had ruined my whole good day.
At first I blamed the traffic light. That damn light! If not for the flapping butterfly wing of that stupid busted stoplight I would have made it to work on time!
But that’s not really true, is it?
It’s that I rolled out of the house late. Had I had my you-know-what together and left earlier, there would have been less traffic.
But that’s also not really true, is it? Because even leaving late, I would have taken a different road and been fine…if I had a full tank of gas.
The crux of this whole thing was my empty gas tank.
See, last night when I was driving home, my near empty gas tank was already beeping at me. I could have stopped for gas on the route home, but feeling lazy and tired, I chose not to.
So the flapping wing, really, was my decision not to stop and get petrol last night.
That one decision has blown my whole Wednesday morning.
And unlike the television show, I can’t do a second act on this day and show what would have happened if the decisions had gone differently.
I have to, as The Good Man says, “just play through”.
That there is chaos theory, Karen style.
