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Karma's A Bitch
Aug. 14th, 2015 04:39 pmIt bears saying that I really have to wonder, when something I really care about requires me to simply send an email with a few photos to get it to happen, and suddenly Flickr, my laptop, my iPad, my phone, my router, both routers at the only cafe in the neighborhood I can go work at, and the trackpad and wifi networking on the replacement laptop I was just given are all suddenly broken at the same time... yet I look around the cafe and not a single other person is having a problem getting online, while I'm blocked at every turn and have to spend a half hour troubleshooting just to get a web page to load... so sending that one simple email literally takes a week of struggling... and this sort of annoying, highly improbably ballet of everything breaking independently of each other all at once so as to perfectly stymie my goal is not rare, but happens to me /all the time/... I really have to wonder, if there isn't some grand design behind it all.
When I was a teenager—could this really have been 30 years ago? Has this really been going on for that long?—my best friend said to me at one point, through a haze of low- Mexican mersh weed, "Mike, you're like Charlie Brown. You're like the coolest Charlie Brown that could ever exist, but you're like Charlie Brown." At another point, after a similar dance of unbelievable snafus exacerbating each other with stunning synchronicity a classmate looked at me and said, "Mike, your life is a case study in frustration." And she was right. She was right then, and she's right now. Without failing to appreciate the numerous ways in which I'm incredibly fortunate, I was just born under a bad sign. In many ways, things have simply and seemingly at long odds just never worked out for me. It's even noticeable to the people around me. The older I get the harder and harder it is not to return to my original youthful belief that it's so strange, things fall apart so perfectly and so improbably, frequently, that there really must be some design behind it.
Boy, I hope whatever I did in my previous life was worth this karma, because I am sure tired of it.
(On the upside, my character is like tempered steel, baby. Long as I got me, that's all I need, and I can weather anything. Even if sometimes I really wish I could just crack under the strain.)
When I was a teenager—could this really have been 30 years ago? Has this really been going on for that long?—my best friend said to me at one point, through a haze of low- Mexican mersh weed, "Mike, you're like Charlie Brown. You're like the coolest Charlie Brown that could ever exist, but you're like Charlie Brown." At another point, after a similar dance of unbelievable snafus exacerbating each other with stunning synchronicity a classmate looked at me and said, "Mike, your life is a case study in frustration." And she was right. She was right then, and she's right now. Without failing to appreciate the numerous ways in which I'm incredibly fortunate, I was just born under a bad sign. In many ways, things have simply and seemingly at long odds just never worked out for me. It's even noticeable to the people around me. The older I get the harder and harder it is not to return to my original youthful belief that it's so strange, things fall apart so perfectly and so improbably, frequently, that there really must be some design behind it.
Boy, I hope whatever I did in my previous life was worth this karma, because I am sure tired of it.
(On the upside, my character is like tempered steel, baby. Long as I got me, that's all I need, and I can weather anything. Even if sometimes I really wish I could just crack under the strain.)
