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April 28, 2006
Its funny
How one moment everything can be fine, even moving along at something of a nice pace, and you are making progress! Then in like 5 seconds everything is totally in the shitter, then, just as quickly life is beautiful again. The little tricks the universe plays come in a sudden shower like rain, (and these days you have evidence that rain only helps to make tulips bloom absolutely everywhere) and a beautiful rainbow appears and your breath is absolutely gone for the sheer wonderfulness of it all.
Because yesterday, in a nutshell, that is kind of how it went.
The condensed version~ I had a job interview, or what I thought was an interview, which turned into a job. A great job, though low-paying, supervising a roomful of spoiled dogs with behavior problems! Yes, I was a doggy-daycare worker, for all of four hours! So imagine a roomful of dogs in all shapes, sizes, and configurations, old, young, shaggy, sleek, jowly, smushy-faced, needle-nosed, fat, skinny, brown, black, white, tan, yellow, red, spotted, solid-colored, pointy-eared, floppy-eared, floofy tailed, smooth tailed, no tailed, 30 of them in all, clamoring, barking, sniffing, kissing, fighting, slurping, snoring, howling, scratching, drinking, shedding, stinking, and yes, PEEING!!! And me in the middle, for some reason the official Little Dawg Magnet™. Could it be, I let them take turns sitting in my lap?! Oh, they were fighting for the lap time! Everytime they saw me coming! I had 2 in my lap and 3 under the chair! The little ones need the lap.
So at this point you are wondering what went wrong, well I'll tell you. It isn't pretty. Dig it, if you don't have health insurance, don't tell anyone if you want to work with the dawgs. Because they won't let you! It seems terribly unfair, but the thing is she was afraid I would get bitten. I wasn't. But still. Liability (Even though I was an independent contractor. I still don't get it.) and all that.
It was very disappointing to have to leave all my new friends, too!
Then, here is the best/worst part!
Since I wanted to look good for the interview, and plus planned to go from there to bike class, I brought jeans, 2 t-shirts, and a belt, which I left in a bag, in my pannier, on the back of my bike, outside.
Some extremely low excuse for the most lowly form of pondscum made off with my pannier, only one of them, while I was in the doggy daycare!!! Not the other pannier, which had in it, among other things, a cta card with about $20 on it, my cell phone, some insulin and syringes! Did not steal syringes. Stole my favorite jeans and one pannier. I can't think about it too much because a.) I already have and 2.) my head will explode.
Of course I knew better than to leave my pannier out there. But I've done it before. There's a first time for every stupid thing I suppose.
So, in summation, I went to a $7 an hour job, cleaned up dog crap (not that I minded that part, I really didn't) got paid $28, and lost approximately $150 worth of stuff. You do the math.
I'm trying really hard not to take that stuff that happened yesterday personally.
It did get slightly better from there.
I went to Filter to drown my sorrows and had cheesecake and knitted. Travisty met me there, and from there we went to replace one of my shirts, because I also needed to change for bike class. I got the shirt and we were heading to the Brown Elephant (thrift! Good for what ails you!) and a young man on a bike went by and grinned a big grin and said, "its Bono! Behind you! Its Bono, from U2!" Sure enough, behind us, a dude with a 2-person entourage, shortish with shiny, greasy black hair and stubble. Still, it was hard to say. We went in the store and he passed close enough by us that I could see he was smoking this huge cigar and looking like he knew we were looking, and trying to look like he wasn't looking back, while we tried to look like we weren't looking. I averted my eyes, because the whole thing made me really squiggly. (Because if it was Bono, then what?? What do you say to Bono, for gosh sakes? And plus, isn't it dorky to stare at Bono? Even if you don't want to be staring, which of course you can't help it because everyone else is staring at Bono? And plus you could just be staring at some guy who looks an awful lot like Bono. Oh, its mind-boggling, isn't it?) A woman from the store went out and looked, and came back saying, "Its not Bono, its just some guy with greasy hair."
So we still didn't know for sure, and probably never will!
Then I went to bike class and Travisty helped me finish my back brake and I put on my derailleurs and chain.
Here is the bonus photographic evidence that if you look around and see devils everywhere trying to steal your joy (and your stuff), really they are angels who are liberating you from the things of this world~
You know it for sure when you sit by a waterfall on a warm sunny day.
And you listen to the water tumbling over the rocks.
You forget where you are, and are frolicking outside of time as Travisty launches tiny leaf-boats over the falling water.
We rode magic conveyances
past a splendid hacienda!
And on the way home we heard the a sound!! A sound you don't hear so much of in the urban environment! Could it be~!?
A neighbor!!
And the world was big again.
Posted by at April 28, 2006 06:31 PM
Comments
I turned around after I asked that biking kid like three times "what are you saying??" Then I went into the store. I turned around once in the store and then looked right at him as he walked by. I raised my eyebrows and didn't take my eyes off his shiny sun glasses. I couldn't tell. I went in and he entered later but i didn't see anymore than that. It seems the sales women were more interested to know than I was. They also were not convinced. Bono escapes unscathed!
Posted by: TravEsty at April 29, 2006 06:24 PM
well:
a) doesn't it seem unlikely that Bono smokes ceegarz? and
b) if I saw Bono in the high street, I would just say to him, "He-e-ey. Aren't you that guy? From that like, band? Weren't they really popular in the 80's?"
keep on truckin'
-db
Posted by: db at May 1, 2006 05:21 AM
I'm sorry about your lost jobs and stuff, and glad to hear of your found equanimity.
The best thing about db’s suggestion is that it works, whether or not you are talking to Bono.
Posted by: rob helpychalk at May 1, 2006 02:33 PM