Excuse me sir, do you mind opening this?
I don't believe in karma. "Good things come to those who wait," is a tired expression used to comfort people who miss out on everything. I am well on my way to becoming a bitter old woman who lives with her twelve cats in a tiny apartment. I'll name each cat after a country I've never visited and knit them afghans that they'll piss on.
Whenever I sit down to get anything accomplished, even a journal entry, I become overwhelmed with exhaustion. It's gotten to the point where I've started writing entries in stages. I used to be able to sit and write for hours, now I can barely manage thirty minutes. Recalling the events of a few days will take me over a week to do, and so an entry that talks about what happened at our Halloween party has been a work-in-progress since the end of October. Mind you, I inserted this paragraph after I'd gone over five minutes without writing a word. I was staring off, thinking about how nice a nap would be.
This isn't going to be a real entry. That's why this is public. If you think I'm being self-important and am overestimating my mysteriousness, you would be wrong. I'm probably underestimating the people around me. Nobody is going to want to read this.
There are a significant number of people who have lives that work out. I'm not usually one of them. I'm the girl that walks down the street in new clothes on a sunny day, just to have a storm roll in and pour buckets of water on her. After going home to change, I'm the girl that throws her new clothes in the wash, and miraculously they come out covered with funky stains.
About sixty percent of the time, I can't open bottles without cutting or blistering my hands on those oh-so-rough plastic caps. I have to ask people around me to do it. As they twist the cap off with ease they usually look at me like I'm retarded. Then I'll take a sip of my drink, only to spill it down my front.
Sometimes I think there's something wrong with my cerebellum and primary motor cortex, because I never grew out of my awkward stage. My shins are covered with bruises from running into god-knows-what. When I'm doing the dishes, my motor coordination is so poor that I'll wind up sloshing water over my torso. Taking corners is sometimes difficult for me. I'm grateful when I make it around without slamming my shoulder into the wall. Luckily for me, this only semi-transferred over to my driving abilities.
As if clumsiness weren't cruel enough, in every grade I went through in elementary, middle, and high school I had at least one teacher tell me I should be a writer. I decided I wanted to be a doctor. This was about as realistic as deciding to go to school to become a fairy princess. With time, my dream got dumbed down from doctor, to physician assistant, to "ohmygodwhatthefuckamIgoingtodowithmylife." Clearly, obtaining a useless bachelor's degree was the only solution, and soon I will be the proud owner of a piece of paper from Northeastern University that will get me the same jobs I could have gotten with a high school diploma. But, I got that paper in three years instead of four! I'm running a race against myself, and it's a long race off a short pier.
I'm applying to graduate school for nursing. I don't have a nursing undergraduate degree, so these are direct-entry programs. I paid $260 to take the GREs twice. The first time I took the test, it told me the exact same thing I heard for thirteen years: "Adrienne, you should be a writer, because you suck at everything else." I decided to study for the math section and retake the exam, because surely, I could do better. The GRE responded with an even lower math score, and an even higher verbal and analytical writing score. It's a great consolation for me to know that my writing is in the 90th percentile, but the one score that mattered for what I want to do with myself is below the 50th percentile. If nothing else, I got to enjoy staring at a computer monitor for eight hours.
I don't have many of the prerequisites for the graduate programs completed. Mailing in one application with a prerequisite GPA of 4.0 felt great, until I considered that I had only completed one out of the six required courses. The prerequisite I'm taking now I'm struggling in, of course. It takes a special kind of person to insist on doing something as a career that they know they're bad at. I'll cross my fingers for graduate school, but I'll stop short of holding my breath.
I thought it would be nice to finish out my undergraduate degree by taking a class with my friends. Go out with a bang, or some such crap. After carefully compiling a schedule for myself, and getting everyone who could to register for the class, I tried to register only to be blocked from the course. While all my friends registered without a problem, I had to get an advisor to register me. Afterall, this is my life we're talking about here. As is the case with my life, by the time the advisor did it, the course was full. No vacancy in the room, so not even the professor can register me.
Merriam-Webster defines pessimism as, "an inclination to expect the worst possible outcome." I guess I'm being pessimistic. It's hard to look at the glass as half-full when it's being dumped in your lap. Plenty of people I know would reply to this swill with something along the lines of, "Hey, there are people who have it a lot worse!" This is the optimistic view: It could be worse. I have a serious question, does that ever make anyone feel good? "Hey, so you lost all your fingers when your friend decided a chainsaw was an appropriate Halloween prop... Well, just think, it could be worse!" Thanks asshat, because you telling me that is almost as good as morphine.
The extreme version of this is actually listing the ways it could be worse. People who feel the need to point out that you could be homeless, starving, and dying of some terrible disease. Suddenly the loss of your fingers pales in comparison to the suffering homeless infant dying of malnutrition. "Shut up about your fingers! At least you aren't a five-year-old living with herpes in a garbage dump outside New York City! WHY DON'T YOU THINK ABOUT THAT FOR ONCE?!!!1!?!!one@!!111!"
Telling people, "Other people have it worse" is the ultimate way to shut them up without actually making them feel better about anything. You invalidate everything that they're struggling with, while making it impossible for them to argue against it. It's a slightly nicer way of saying, "I don't feel like listening to your shit, stop fucking talking." Only the most selfish person would continue ranting after it has been established that in your opinion, they really don't have it that bad.
So, just think: It could be worse. I could continue writing.
Whenever I sit down to get anything accomplished, even a journal entry, I become overwhelmed with exhaustion. It's gotten to the point where I've started writing entries in stages. I used to be able to sit and write for hours, now I can barely manage thirty minutes. Recalling the events of a few days will take me over a week to do, and so an entry that talks about what happened at our Halloween party has been a work-in-progress since the end of October. Mind you, I inserted this paragraph after I'd gone over five minutes without writing a word. I was staring off, thinking about how nice a nap would be.
This isn't going to be a real entry. That's why this is public. If you think I'm being self-important and am overestimating my mysteriousness, you would be wrong. I'm probably underestimating the people around me. Nobody is going to want to read this.
There are a significant number of people who have lives that work out. I'm not usually one of them. I'm the girl that walks down the street in new clothes on a sunny day, just to have a storm roll in and pour buckets of water on her. After going home to change, I'm the girl that throws her new clothes in the wash, and miraculously they come out covered with funky stains.
About sixty percent of the time, I can't open bottles without cutting or blistering my hands on those oh-so-rough plastic caps. I have to ask people around me to do it. As they twist the cap off with ease they usually look at me like I'm retarded. Then I'll take a sip of my drink, only to spill it down my front.
Sometimes I think there's something wrong with my cerebellum and primary motor cortex, because I never grew out of my awkward stage. My shins are covered with bruises from running into god-knows-what. When I'm doing the dishes, my motor coordination is so poor that I'll wind up sloshing water over my torso. Taking corners is sometimes difficult for me. I'm grateful when I make it around without slamming my shoulder into the wall. Luckily for me, this only semi-transferred over to my driving abilities.
As if clumsiness weren't cruel enough, in every grade I went through in elementary, middle, and high school I had at least one teacher tell me I should be a writer. I decided I wanted to be a doctor. This was about as realistic as deciding to go to school to become a fairy princess. With time, my dream got dumbed down from doctor, to physician assistant, to "ohmygodwhatthefuckamIgoingtodowithmylife." Clearly, obtaining a useless bachelor's degree was the only solution, and soon I will be the proud owner of a piece of paper from Northeastern University that will get me the same jobs I could have gotten with a high school diploma. But, I got that paper in three years instead of four! I'm running a race against myself, and it's a long race off a short pier.
I'm applying to graduate school for nursing. I don't have a nursing undergraduate degree, so these are direct-entry programs. I paid $260 to take the GREs twice. The first time I took the test, it told me the exact same thing I heard for thirteen years: "Adrienne, you should be a writer, because you suck at everything else." I decided to study for the math section and retake the exam, because surely, I could do better. The GRE responded with an even lower math score, and an even higher verbal and analytical writing score. It's a great consolation for me to know that my writing is in the 90th percentile, but the one score that mattered for what I want to do with myself is below the 50th percentile. If nothing else, I got to enjoy staring at a computer monitor for eight hours.
I don't have many of the prerequisites for the graduate programs completed. Mailing in one application with a prerequisite GPA of 4.0 felt great, until I considered that I had only completed one out of the six required courses. The prerequisite I'm taking now I'm struggling in, of course. It takes a special kind of person to insist on doing something as a career that they know they're bad at. I'll cross my fingers for graduate school, but I'll stop short of holding my breath.
I thought it would be nice to finish out my undergraduate degree by taking a class with my friends. Go out with a bang, or some such crap. After carefully compiling a schedule for myself, and getting everyone who could to register for the class, I tried to register only to be blocked from the course. While all my friends registered without a problem, I had to get an advisor to register me. Afterall, this is my life we're talking about here. As is the case with my life, by the time the advisor did it, the course was full. No vacancy in the room, so not even the professor can register me.
Merriam-Webster defines pessimism as, "an inclination to expect the worst possible outcome." I guess I'm being pessimistic. It's hard to look at the glass as half-full when it's being dumped in your lap. Plenty of people I know would reply to this swill with something along the lines of, "Hey, there are people who have it a lot worse!" This is the optimistic view: It could be worse. I have a serious question, does that ever make anyone feel good? "Hey, so you lost all your fingers when your friend decided a chainsaw was an appropriate Halloween prop... Well, just think, it could be worse!" Thanks asshat, because you telling me that is almost as good as morphine.
The extreme version of this is actually listing the ways it could be worse. People who feel the need to point out that you could be homeless, starving, and dying of some terrible disease. Suddenly the loss of your fingers pales in comparison to the suffering homeless infant dying of malnutrition. "Shut up about your fingers! At least you aren't a five-year-old living with herpes in a garbage dump outside New York City! WHY DON'T YOU THINK ABOUT THAT FOR ONCE?!!!1!?!!one@!!111!"
Telling people, "Other people have it worse" is the ultimate way to shut them up without actually making them feel better about anything. You invalidate everything that they're struggling with, while making it impossible for them to argue against it. It's a slightly nicer way of saying, "I don't feel like listening to your shit, stop fucking talking." Only the most selfish person would continue ranting after it has been established that in your opinion, they really don't have it that bad.
So, just think: It could be worse. I could continue writing.