Be Happy

Be Happy. It's okay to be happy- since when did being happy become a crime? I used to have this job; okay, it was a maid job, but in fact, I really enjoyed it (aside from the fact that they made me wear pleated polyester uniform pants. That's criminal, and I stomached down the putting on of said pant for the love of my fun job) but I worked for a woman who was obviously Unhappy, bitter and slightly evil. (Classic woman boss?) uh oh.
So every day i came to work smiling, happy. It didn't bother me that I was going to be cleaning pubes off of urinals, or lifting chair after chair to get the vacuum under tables. I made it my mission to hunt the stray macaronis that got away from their plates and mouths of children. They weren't in the clear yet...they'd have had to grow legs or a roachy passenger for that.
But when I walked in, ready to face the day, my boss would sneer. Some days, she would question me.
"Why are you so happy?"
"What are you, on drugs?"

Sheesh. Nowadays, a pretty good response to that would be chimpanzee smile. I see all these arrests made for meth heads on the news, and they have this uncanny resemblance to old granny from Beverly Hillbillies. Then you read they're 23, and you think, damn. No teeth.
So when they jealously made snide drug remarks upon seeing your happiness, just give em
Chimpanzee Smile.

I discovered myself doing something today that made me a hypocrite- though small in action, after catching myself in this act I'll have to change my ways. Walking through the kitchen, I opened the gummy vites, and when an orange one came, after two attempts putting it back, I got a pink and purple. However, I do not let my children have the same luxury. I'd have made them take the orange one. But I just didn't want it. So my new rule is "Get the flavor you want, then we'll eat all the orange ones at the end." Because the orange ones are pretty good when its all that's left.
The sun's come out. Have a cool day :)

Hehe.
Again, it's been forever!
I just haven't been the same since the lobotomy.
(That's a joke. But only barely...)

So I apologize for not checking in; sometimes I'll think of something really interesting and blog worthy, but by the time I'm here I don't remember what that thing is.
What have I been doing? Have I read any good books? What have I learned this year?
I'm not that person that's going to awaken your spirit with some sorta great revelation.
Oh! Okay.
I guess I learned that scrunching your hair when it's wet does not make it curly. I also learned that towel drying your hair (basically towel-scrunching, so I'm just being repetitive) & then the non-combing of said hair also, does not make it curly.
For some people, it takes a long time to learn something like this. You might be one, I don't know. I might too. But I have adopted a hair brush when wet thing that is working out pretty well for me.
I learned that the phrase "If you can't do something right, don't do it at all" is not necessarily correct. A half ass job is still half. And that's better than none. Staring at a pile of magazines on the floor, going thru half the pile and trashing a little is better than walking past the pile. Washing half the dishes is better than no dishes. So my new phrase is

A Half-Ass job is still half.*

I have a class reunion coming up this month. Yay.

But my husband's smokin hot so I guess I have one thing going for me. The man is beautiful, seriously.

And I can always blame my lack of finesse in the area of smalltalk, my stumbling into the consistant wrong thing to say on brain surgery if I screw up too badly. But hopefully it'll not come to that.

Because both before and after brain surgery, I'm the same. I'm simple. I like to just put it that way rather than the derogitory phrase 'simple-minded.' It sounds better. Lynyrd Skynyrd made it into a bragging right somewhat. But I haven't been able to listen to LS since the mid-nineties; Years ago we saw them at the Tabernacle and the smoke, mullets and speaker throttling lack of volume control left me deaf for a few days. Freebird has never been the same. If you've been reading this for a long time, I'll have to turn to the Taterbug reference. If you haven't, back track. :P

Went to a potluck yesterday. Oh! But before the potluck, I went to the grocery store. So the girl asks me what's new when she's bagging my gro, and I say 'I'm going to a potluck!' And she says 'What's that?' So I tell her it's a thing where people bring food, then I'm trying to think of the words to explain it and all that came out was,

"You know when somebody dies and everybody brings a covered dish? It's like that without the dead person."

"Oh," she says. (If you've come to the conclusion that this person made me feel smart by not knowing what a potluck was, this isn't the case. Sometimes intelligence is purely a matter of life experience. If you know what a potluck is, that's probably cause you've been invited to one. Which doesn't make you smart, just lucky). :)

So the potluck in question was a UU (Unitarian Universalist) Potluck. UUers are pretty random but liberal types, and this UU group is like an extension of my family. I really do love them all, and though the faces change from potluck to potluck, they are familiar and warm, and the food is always good.

The New Guy. So there were maybe thirty or forty folks there, mostly that I knew, and then this one new guy. The new guy had become disgruntled with his previous UU group due to 'too much New Age talk,' stating he'd made a fuss about it and couldn't go back. I'd seen my mother set her lovely pie down, and knew doing the math, 30 or 40 heads versus 8 slices of pie, that my best option wouls be to go straight for the pie, because hell, the cheese slices and macaroni salad would still be there, but there were kids present, and this was my own mothers pie we're talking about. So I selected my pie, and then framed the pie with little bits of things; a meatball here, two spoonfuls of salad there, til it was folding over a little and Linda handed me a tray. (God bless Linda...She's too good for words).

So I sat across from Steven at a little table, and set down my pie. Then the new guy sat down beside me. He told me about how he'd been disgruntled with his old group. How he didn't see how they could carry on so. Growing up fundamentally Christian, he told me, what was the difference between listening to that hubub (Hubub is my word, not his, but I'm just trying to tell the thing) than going back to what he'd heard before? He wanted scientific proof behind anything in order to make it truth. So he brings up Stephen Hawking (?) and his new theory that because the conscious mind dies when the brain dies, there's obviously no afterlife. He is seeking debate. "I grew up with reincarnation, so it's a little different for me," I tell him. Then he begins with his evolution speech, and asks about apes. Did Apes reincarnate? So I'm trying to be polite but then he keeps asking me questions, and I say that I just always felt that our spirits seek higher consciousness, and that we will continue to evolve until we no longer need to, spiritually, and then we go back to being one with God- but that it was just one persons idea, and that I felt people have to find their own spiritual conclusions. But what I said in my head was, "I just want to eat my pie."

Damn! Let me eat my pie. F*ck, if you came to try to disprove other people's belief systems, maybe UU is not right for you. Or maybe it is exactly right, just not with me, and definitely not with me and my pie. I'm simple! Let it be.

Agnostics. So I get along well with athiests/agnostics, perhaps because believing in a bit of everything can be similar to believing in nothing. It is what it is, or maybe not/we'll see. (It's those people who believe in the one concrete thing that you have to worry about- those are the troublemakers, lol). So my mother asks me if I invited this friend I have to the potluck.

"No," i say, "She's athiest. I don't think she wants any part of a religious organization."

"Why?" she asks me, so I try to explain that sometimes when you don't believe in anything, you don't feel the need to look for it. If you don't believe in aliens, a shooting star will never be a spaceship.

So I'd brought up religion with this friend in the car, and she said she didn't really believe in anything in particular. Then, I said, 'So would you say your agnostic, or more like athiest?'

'I don't really like to label myself or people in that way.'

She was right. Darn it if I didn't take a look at myself later on and feel slightly like one of those Baptist ladies that ask you if your saved in the check out line. I was the New Age crazy person. But it's not so much I want to label people, but that I'm 'grouping' in my head. It's just a weird thing I do- which doesn't mean one group is better or worse, it's just a strange thing. Whatever you are is accepted, I just kinda want to know how you got there.

Which just brings me back to the new guy. Maybe he had what might've seemed a pushier way, but wasn't that what he was asking all along? :) It's odd how the train of thought often loops back to where it started. Much love, Kat

*unless you're getting paid for it. Then half-assed is truly half-assed.