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The Hard Way
I don�t like to brag or nothin�, but guess who hasn�t had to eat lunch alone one single day this week? It�s like another week in the Twilight Zone around here. In the year and a half that I have worked here I�ve gotten quite used to taking lunch by myself. I bring my little book and eat my boring sack lunch and secretly but effectively spy on the cute boys at pretty much the same time every single day. It�s a step up from when I worked at Duke and hardly ever took lunch at all but still a step below where I would like to be (which, essentially, is seated at the head of the �cool kids� table. Not that such a thing exists. Only in my head.) In any case, I work on the same floor as my sister-in-law only I hardly ever see her (she�s in the lab, I�m in the�.hallway, she�s on the west side, I�m on the east side it�s a breeding ground for a gang war around here) until this week when we�ve managed to hit our lunch hour at the same time. I�ve been invited to sit at the table with her and her friend every single day this week and the strangest thing is starting to happen - people are talking to me! Including one of the cute boys I spy on who completely drove out any inkling of �crush� I might have had on him when he proved himself to be a hard core �conversation killer.� I like this change. It�s very fitting with the whole �take no prisoners� summer I�m about to embark upon. In other news � it was raining like a sumbitch when I came in to work this morning. Wait, let me backstory. At 3:30 a.m. this morning I woke to the sound of raging storms. Thunder, lightning, pounding rain. I stumbled out of bed and pulled the fan out of the window and then closed the window enough so that rain blowing towards the window would not actually make it inside the house. I then crawled back into bed, patted Oliver on the head and zonked back out. Three hours later I was up and about, showering, breakfasting, making lunch, moisturizing face, taking multi-vitamin like a good twenty-something singleton. I took Oliver for our ritual early morning game of fetch and peeped up at the sky while the rain sort of plip plopped off the trees and I thought �it�s so funny how it never seems to be raining when I walk to work. Sometimes it rains when I�m coming home from work, but there never seems to be a shower at this exact time of day.� (P.S. Oh? What do YOU think about at 6:30 in the morning?) In any case, it was just the opening that God was looking for. When I finally left for work it was coming down at a pretty steady drizzle. By the time I parked my car it was a pretty nice shower. Halfway up the block I realized I was walking to work in a bona fide rainstorm. Right smack dab in the middle between length of time it takes to get to the Subway (in our case that means underground walkways that connect all the buildings downtown) and the amount of time it takes me to get to my building from outside there was a gigantic crash of thunder and the rain started blowing sideways. 5 minutes later the wind blew me through my door and from the knee down my pants were dripping wet. Also wet? My backpack, my jacket, my arms, my socks, and my shoes. Curiously left completely untouched � my face and my hair. I mean sure, I was walking with umbrella but given the amount of wet that still found me, and the fact that the rain, at one point, was sort of coming UP from the GROUND and disobeying all laws of physics, it�s still a surprise that my hair came out of the whole thing unscathed. It�s a good thing too because my hair � when air dried and without product, looks kind of like David Cassidy�s hair circa 1976. Turns out, I am a slave to my hair product. Anyhow, that�s not the point. My socks are still wet. THAT�s the point. It was not a promising beginning to the day. And also, God? You�ve made your point. I don�t think we need a repeat performance of this anytime soon. Other things are working themselves out. Sometimes a little distance and a little perspective makes all the difference in the world. Sometimes it's not all about me. Sometimes you put a lot of time and energy into following a path only to find out that the destination was hardly worth the price you paid to get there. Sometimes you just have to learn things the hard way. That is all.
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