The most innoculous, terrible question with the harshest lie

“How are you?” asked by Barbara, the cashier at Publix.

Such an innoculous question.  The automatic answer “Fine” comes out without a concious thought nowadays.

I once vowed to always answer that question truthfully.  But today, I’m having just a terrible day.  And I really don’t want to talk about it.  But it’s up there on the worst-days-list.  (Don’t worry friends, no one died.)  Today, en route to that Publix, I was on the verge of tears.  But I pulled myself together, as I must, as I was taught growing up, and went inside to buy my Axe body spray.

Then she asked.   Then I froze.  And I had to force out a reply – “fine.”  That must have sounded like the surliest “fine” she had ever heard.  She looked confused, but let it go.

I couldn’t tell her “I’m doing terrible.  Thanks for asking.”  Besdies the inevitable follow up questions which I did not and still do not want to answer right now, I’m then placing an unfair burden of guilt on a stranger.  Yes, I know “well, she did ask.”  But a) very few people who ask that really want to know the truth, they just do it to be polite (maybe that’s just a southern thing, I don’t know) and b) I don’t feel like I have the right to make someone worried or concerned.

I originally had something else as b.  But the more I think about it, the more that the new b might just be right.  That, I can blame partially if not entirely on my upbringing and coping with so many deaths at such a young age.

.I felt like I heard a nail, nailing yet another closet door shut, like part of me just died a little.  And I know that every time I answer “fine” to a question, I only make things worse.

I had a discussion with someone at work, a Korean female, who I knew was having a terrbile day.  I asked how she was, and she said “fine.”  I knew it was clearly a lie, so I told her that she didn’t have to lie to me, and if it was a terrible day than she can say so.  She told me that as a Korean female she just isn’t allowed to have a bad day, and especially not allowed to tell others if she is.

I thought it was nuts.  But now I know exactly what she meant.

Entropy and the Laws of Life

I was thinking about how I’ve recently given my apartment a deep clean, and how I always struggle to keep it clean.  It made me think of entropy.

Yah, I know.  A little odd, but there you go.

Things that are organized have no stability; hence, the universe tends towards disorganization, as it likes stability.  How’s that for entropy made simple?

Sure, this is a nice and easy way to get out of cleaning my own apartment, but I’ve been thinking about this disorganization is stability concept.  How often have we tried to plan out an event only to have something go wrong?  Did we freak out about it, or just let it ride as the Universe righting itself?  Lord knows I’ve freaked out about events going awry – I was determined to have every single aspect of the event organized before the event.  Thinking about it further, I can’t think of any other way than saying I was trying to one-up the Universe.

How often have we tried to plan out a day, only to have it go horribly off track?  That’s certainly happened to me, more often than I can count.  Part of me cringes at the mere thought of an organized day going off track, but the mere derailment of an organized day doesn’t mean the day is lost – sometimes, it ends up better than originally planned, sometimes worse, but either way it’s the Universe kicking that organization to the curb.

Taking this even further, how often have we tried to plan out our lives only to have it go awry?

I’ve got a friend going through this turmoil right now – his life isn’t where he had planned for it to be, and it’s clearly causing him some pain.  I’ve certainly gone through that, as my quarter life crisis posts suggest from over a year ago.  I would say I’m out of that phase now.  I can’t say its anything active on my part, but I think a large part of it is acceptance that, yes, life won’t ever be organized to my desires, but a large part of that is clearly out of my control – gravity will pull the blocks down no matter how high I stack them, and liquids will always fit the shape of its container.

So maybe I shouldn’t really try to plan out the next few years of my life, the next few decades of my life.  Part of me is already anxious over that thought – odd, since I really don’t have any sort of plan, but the mere thought of not having a plan causes anxiety (now that calls for future exploration.)  Besides the inevitable anxiety over the plan, and anger when not meeting the plan, the universe is pretty clear that organization won’t last.

It’s easy to say I’ll just leave “it”, aka my life, up to the Universe, well, easy to type, but it seems extraordinarily difficult to actually believe and accept.  Accepting that your organization will inevitably fall like Newton’s apple means that you’re powerless.  And it’s not appropriate to feel powerless in our society.  It’s easy to fight against the Universe, and make grandiose plans on where you’ll be in ten years.  Easy to fight against, but impossible to win.

You have on the other hand, those that say the Universe helps those who help themselves.  Maybe the right method is to have a general direction of where you’d like to go without the specifics that you become too attached too.  But, then again, when running a business, how often do you need to have that specific plan for the long term.  But is there any such thing as long-term success in the corporate world?  Inevitably, all businesses will fail at some point – nothing’s permanent.  So while the short term (short term could even be on the order of decades and centuries mind you) needs a plan for corporate success, no long-term plan can cure that inevitable death (either corporate or human.)

For those with the continual five-year plans, I wonder how happy they are in comparison to those without detailed plans, but floating through the universe without a pile of blocks to be knocked over.  Because isn’t that the goal for all of us?  To find happiness, no matter what our definition of happiness may be?  If my blocks keep getting knocked down by the Universe in its desire for disorder but stability, I won’t be happy as I have to constantly restack them.

But maybe stability isn’t what everyone wants in life.  They want to stack up the bocks to get to their highest potential, and if the universe knocks them down, they find joy in rebuilding.  I’ve come to realize that stability means more to me then great heights.  [Part of this, I’m sure, was the severe instability of my childhood – and the desire to find stability for once.  (“My happy little ruts.”)]  I find comfort, and dare I say happiness, in the stability of my life.  Maybe I need to try to fight the Universe a little less often and try to listen to it more.

The most amazing week ever

This week has been one of the most emotionally draining weeks of my life, and I would argue that most non-death-related draining week of my life.  I went from questioning my faith, to having a crisis, to feeling pretty much hopeless, then having my faith reawakened and now it’s almost over powering.  This is a recap of this week.  It’s long, as a warning.

The spirituality of baking cookies

Every year around this time, much to the delight of my students, I go through a baking bonanza. I call it my Christmas Cookie Bakefest. I bake an obscene amount of cookies for the 20s/30s Holiday Party (and take the lots of leftovers to work.) Every year I try an experimental cookie – last year it was my andes double mint chocholate chip cookies, which were a resounding success. (This year I topped it with Carmel Chocolate Chip cookies – my own chocolate chip cookie recippie, with these little caramel drops stirred in. They are wonderful!)

This is the only time of the year I really get into baking cookies. And there’s something almost spiritual about it.

I’m making something from scratch, combing many little somethings into something greater than the sum of their parts.  And I give it to others; sharing something tangible and edible with my friends and family.  And in such, sharing a little of myself.

You know you’ve had a long/bad week…

It’s been a rough week in the life of Kinsi.  I’ve had much worse in my life, but this is probably the worst so far this year.  I pretty much had to fire someone for the first time – I didn’t have to actually make the call but I had to send him an evaluation that made it clear it was about to happen, and it pretty much completely trashed him.  He’s a nice guy too, which sucks all the more, and made me feel like crap this week.  But he’s just too, well, incompetent to be a tutor.  if you are going to tutor math, you need to know at least Algebra 2 concepts.  My brain knows that its part of my job, and certainly the students will be better off with their new tutor, but it just doesn’t make that sadness in my heart go away.  I have to write about 15 more evaluations at some point soon, and I’ve got a few rather big work projects weighing on me.  I haven’t had time this week to work on my NaNoWriMo and have accepted my goal shall go unmet.

I had a huge back and forth with trying to rent a car, which took a lot of mental energy away this week, and in the end when I got to go pick it up they wouldnt take my debit card, so then it was a whole lot of nothing.  When I couldnt find my cell phone when stuck in stop and go traffic in the middle of south carolina (traffic for no reason), I almost broke down in tears.  Its not that the cell phone had all that meaning, but it was just one more thing in top of everything else/.  (The cell phone was found…by me…underneath the center of my passenger side seat.)  Even the songs on my XM/MP3 player were making me want to cry (and we’re not talking about big emo songs here, we’re talking Santeria by Sublime.)  And whats with that random traffic in SC?  Traffic in atlanta doesn’t really annoy me that much, because its to be expected.  But the traffic for no reason in the middle of no where just aggravates me.

I hope thanksgiving will be a break – I’ll be gone from Wed-Sun,  off with my mom and my niece to trek up to Indy for thanksgiving with my grandma, but even then it wont be a real break.  I need to look into cheap vacations for next year.

But I just need a good cry I think.  So I’m going to go watch Ordinary People, one of the movies guaranteed to make me cry.  If I get it out then it’s out and not in, and I wont be obsessing over it.  And hope that the rough week shall end tomorrow.

What a research paper on Emerson can teach me about life

So I work for an education company, for the two of you that don’t know. I still teach a few days a week, but now I mostly do other stuff (like training, which is what I’m doing right now typing via PDA in charlotte.)

My student Chris had to decide on a research paper topic, and I helped out with the decision. He picked the topic Emerson’s attacks on Unitarianism, as he had just read some Emerson in school. Last week I had to proof and edit his paper, which was the first time I has seen his final paper.

Well, he was filled with questions about modern day Unitarian Universalism. This was the first time I had really ever sat down and discussed modern day Unitarian universalism with someone, and that someone was one of my students.

He asked the inevitable question “what do you Unitarians believe?” After stumbling through an answer, he followed up with “well I read you can kind of pick and chose what you like of other religions.” I completely misunderstood his tone – I thought he was implying that was a bad thing but actually thought it was “kinda cool”. So I launched into a discussion about how some believe that and some follow more classic religions. Theres a UU Christian group, a UU Buddhist group, a UU pagan group, etc. He asked me which one I was in – I told him I was an undecided Unitarian universalist, and he thought that was cool. The whole table was absorbed in our discussion…and when I realized that I hollared for everyone to get back to their math and we moved on.

Evangelism on the job is a tricky business, especially for a religion that sees evangelism as a bad thing. Its even more so when the job is working with kids. I didn’t get to the point of inviting him to some Unitarian church, although there is one pretty close by the center in question. It took a while to get to the point in the conversation where I felt comfortable. I would like to say I don’t know why, but I clearly do.

I’m not solid enough in my beliefs to feel comfortable talking about them with other people in person…especially strangers. I’m just now starting to enter in a time of spiritual exploration, centered around Taoism and Ekhart Tollee, and I have yet to see where that will lead me. I hope that if I felt more comfortable in my own skin, then I would be more comfortable evangelizin’.

Happiness at the corner of Peachtree and Peachtree Corners

I was sitting in traffic on the way to work, at the intersection of Peachtree Parkway and Peachtree Corners, and I started thinking about happiness.

What brought it on?  A few days ago I finished correcting the typos in my 1st real nanowrimo, 41 Sunflowers, the little story that could, I think, one day be published.  I wrote about a girl who I met online, who told me that she decided one day to be happy.  I was confused, so I asked for a little elaboration.  She said happiness was a choice, and she was choosing to be happy.  It stuck with me then, and for some reason on the way to work today I thought about it.  [And, yes, it was actually at that intersection where I hit...there really are that many peachtrees in the metro atlanta area.]

Is happiness a choice?

There are so many times when I’ve been depressed, and wallowed in it.  Too tired to get up out of bed, or to do anything other than read indulgences online.  Even went on generic prozac to try to fix it.  I’m out of that phase, but still not “happy.”

How could anyone be happy, when there’s so much badness and sadness in the world?  People are dieing everyday from war, from famine, from preventable causes.  People are suffering all over the world.  Global warming is going to kill us all, and the planet while we’re at it.  When I’m obsessively checking the news throughout the day, at least 5 times today, the headlines are all doom and gloom, the latest in a string of daily disasters.   Yet I’m horrified when I hear there are people who aren’t well informed, who aren’t watching the news 24/7.  How could anyone stand being ignorant of global problems?

I’ve seen ignorance as the number 1 evil in society, yet, is the adage true and ignorance is bliss?

If being exposed to the harsh realities of our shrinking society, and that causes pain and unhappiness, why wouldn’t I want to check out of knowing everything in reality.  Choosing ignorance over unhappiness.  Choosing ignorance over being a globally responsible citizen.  When I self-righteously criticize other people for being ignorant, and rally against it, am I criticizing the choice to be happy?  Yet being self-righteous and crizitie when people aren’t keeping up with the news isn’t making me happy.  It makes me even further sad that more people aren’t watching the news or angry about my issue of the day.  I’m sad over the news, then I get sadder that more people aren’t paying attention.

We talked about that issue in a small group a while back, and I found myself agreeing with the thought that an ignorant happiness is worse than an aware sadness.  What’s more important….being happy, or being globally aware?  I haven’t met a terribly large amount of people who are happy and in a state of global awareness.

Is happiness a choice?

How many times have I said, “I’m not an optimist, I’m a realist.”  Can I choose to look at a situation that just sucks, both globally and in my life, and instead of getting angryand/or sd about it, actively choose to be happy?

*Is* happiness a *choice*?

Meanness = Promotion?

So my boss assigned me a task because I can be mean. He saw me being rather harsh to a trainee who was on his last day of training. On the last day I’m a little harsher to fine tune some of the problems I’ve caught during training. Everyone says that training is harder than real life on the job, which makes be rather happy to hear frankly. This guy in question did really well on his first actual day of teaching…despite sucking hard that last day.

Well, my boss calls me up and wants to observe a teacher they’ve had complaints about. And he’s picked me because I “can be mean!” He was proud of how harsh I had been on poor unnamed trainee – I could hear motion in his voice when there rarely is any. He wanted me to be that harsh and particular when observing this teacher on Thursday.

So his comments had the total opposite effect on me than what he was hoping they would (I imagine.) I now feel pretty bad about being so harsh and particular with that trainee (despite its very clear results) and I’m rather dreading Thursday since I need to be harsh. I’m worried about getting typecasted.

This brings up a while new realm of questions as well – do I have to be mean to get ahead? I’m not a corporate cutthroat by nature. Is it time to start setting aside these feelings of uneasiness about being an ass to get ahead? AHH! I hate this inner turmoil going through my new quasi-corporate life.

Well, a little glimpse of the future career, dare I say, of Kinsi

Sometimes it’s really damn tough to get out of my boss future plans for me…even on a weekly basis, much less longer term than that (I usually find out where I’ll be Thursday on a Tuesday or Wednesday, for example) but today I asked him about travel -

See, when he promoted me and the other guy, lets call him Alan, he told us that we would alternate trips traveling with him when he goes off to other states to train, etc.  Me and Alan (yes, I also teach grammar for a living) were talking today and turns out the boss has given him a tentative travel schedule – but nothing on this end.  So tonight I asked him – I have a habit of being blunt with this boss, and he responds to it pretty well – what, if anything, the travel schedule would be.   This took place on a cell to cell, sometimes fuzzy connection, but what I gathered is that I’m not going to be traveling…Alan’s going to do it.  I’m going to be sticking close to home and eventually “in charge of Georgia” [and possibly North Carolina when it gets up and running]

Our company does have a plurality of centers in Georgia, and we’re the highest grossing state I believe, although they are hugely expanding out in California and that’ll overtake Georgia eventually.  “In charge” means in charge of like, teacher training, maybe teacher schedules, I guess.  Beats the hell out of me.

So I don’t know whether to be stoked or annoyed.  I don’t terribly mind I’m not going to be travelling – I was torn on whether I would want to travel or not.  Although I will have to travel around in Georgia…and hell maybe North Carolina and other spots in the southeast…it’s not the same as off to Illinois, Texas, etc.

I have to admit, the thoughts are there that Alan’s going to get a bigger promotion than me, which is ludicrous frankly. The two of us are trainers, and since that distinction was made a month ago I’ve really been the only one training new teachers…he’s been evaluating current teachers.  My bosses (including the president) are deferring to me when it comes to the trainees now, especially when they’re done with training and when they’re not, and just today I told the boss that the training curriculum he came up with had to change, and he accepted it.  But I also get the feeling they like him better than me (although I have to admit that might just be paranoia.  I have extraordinary low self-esteem.)

It’s such a complicated mess right now in my head about this whole climbing the corporate ladder thing.  Life was much easier as just a tutor.  This isn’t to say I don’t like training new teachers – I do, but it gets pretty monotonous after a couple of days in a row, whereas tutoring kiddos is/was always different.

Eek! Birthday Anxiety!

Ok, so in about 24 hours I’m turning 25.  There will be celebrating tomorrow, which should be a blast – definitely looking forward to it.

But, for some explicable, the wave of anxiety I’ve been somewhat expecting for weeks now just hit in full force – I’m turning twenty-five.

Holy hell.

Eek.

AHH!  I’m 25!  Most of my dumber high school classmates have a graduate degree (the downside of facebook)!  What the hell am I doing with my life?!?  AHH! There are so many things wrong that I want to change, hoped to have changed by now.  And they aren’t!  AHH!   Crap.

Luckily, I had no real goals by the time I was 25 (I was a rather depressed child) and still don’t really have any goals.  So it’s not the realization that I’m not where I want to be – its that I don’t know where I want to be or where I want to go and everything in me is screaming that I should have had it figured out by I’m 25.

So unless some miraculous epiphany unfolds tonight or tomorrow…shit.

Lets hope this anxiety wave lasts about…2 minutes.