"Hump Day," he he he

Wednesday... aaaaaaahhhh!!! We are almost done with the week, and it really just started. It's kind of like the calendar year, January starts the new year and before you know it, it's Christmas. Of course, it doesn't help that even before Halloween and Thanksgiving, the dreaded Christmas ornaments/stuff is already out and on store shelves, making you feel that you have (again) wasted an entire year. You didn't lose the 20+ pounds, you didn't begin a healthier lifestyle, you did not apply for a better, higher paying job, you didn't get the house painted, you didn't... catch my drift?

Wednesday is for weirdness. There are two sides to weirdness (as to anything), the good side and the bad. The good side of weirdness is any quirkiness that all of a sudden you get a glimpse of and it totally enchants you. For example, finding out that a fifty-something coworker has a piercing in a totally unexpected place. Or another coworker that I barely know sending me a beautiful and supportive email while my son was deployed in Iraq and I was not sleeping nights worrying about him. Or another example, what happened to me last week. I was sorting laundry and something moved in the pile of clothes I was holding. I shrieked and dropped everything, eyes open wide in total disgust, goose bumps all over my body. Out of the pile of clothes crawled a slightly dazed baby possum! In MY garage! It was ugly but cute, the way most babies are. It looked like a baby rat except that it had a patch of long hair on its head and a black stripe running through it. It also had a long, wide mouth and inside, rows of sharp little teeth. I sat and watched in amazement until it crawled back under the pile of clothes (which later my son had to pick up off the ground and he swore there was nothing there, as he sighed patiently, making me feel as crazy as he thinks I am).

That kind of weirdness is lovely. Unexpected, surprising, beautiful chaos that makes my day, indeed, it makes my existence.

But there is bad weirdness too. Bad weirdness is stuff that shouldn't happen, and you don't see it coming. Like when you start going out with someone new and everything is going great. You enjoy each other's company, feel like you could talk about any subject and that person would totally understand you. And then you find out that he already has a girlfriend because she calls you and tells you. And, at first you don't believe her but then she asks you whether or not he left your house at 5 am the other morning and you say "Yes, he did," and she says "Well he came over to my house when he left yours." WHAT?

Bad weirdness is when out of the blue someone calls you to tell you that you owe your neighborhood association $300 for "lawyers' fees" because your house was on foreclosure and they had to draw foreclosure papers on it. HUH? And you had no clue about this and have been paying your mortgage religiously so you have to backtrack and find out what the H*LL happened and correct it through faxing tons of copies of canceled checks, talk to 5 people at your mortgage company to get a letter stating that your house was never put on foreclosure so you can fax it to these bloodthirsty people... Ok by now you must get my drift.

So, I feel that good and bad weirdness rules our world. We can try to feel that we are "in control" of things. In fact that phrase "In control" always makes me laugh because we are all hanging on threads. If you don't believe me, look around you. The world is chaos, total coincidence and happenstance. If you are organized in one area of your life, something will go totally wrong in another, or even in that same area you are trying so hard to dominate because you cannot foresee anything, you cannot control anything, you cannot change what is coming for you. That is, at the same time, the horror and the beauty of it. And we can only try to enjoy the good weirdness, the happy little things that happen, the little possums we find, the good that somehow made its way to us.

Waxing philosophical, but don't let it scare you. I'm still as confused as ever. Perhaps more.

Happy Hump Day everyone!