Today I'm forcing myself back to positivity. I've always maintained that I'm an optimist, that I look for ways to make things better, not worse, that I hate it when people complain. So if I don't want to be a hypocrite, I'll just have to be hypocritical and say things are great. Because essentially they are. Uh-oh, here we go....
You see, I flubbed up. I flubbed up bad - again - embarassingly bad.... I know no one cares but me, and maybe the other person who for sure thinks I'm nuts, too naive for words, or completely full of it. But that's all.
Meanwhile, I've spent over 24 hours not being able to get over it. I wrote a blog that took 7 hours to write and perfect, trying to explain, or rather exonerate, myself. But it didn't help! I posted it and then a few hours later took it down, knowing it was stupid and ridiculous - just aimless, highfaluting bs! Okay, I do believe what I was talking about in the tutorial, in which my student actually got up out of his chair and threw his arms out and shouted it couldn't be so, and at the end of which he stared at me with an expression of utter bewilderment and asked: "so you really believe that people can lead themselves?"... oh, why am I going back to all that - Move on Minshap, get over it! I mean I can believe in harmony, rhythm and balance if I want to. I can believe I live my life by these beliefs, and that my household works under those premises, can't I? I can believe that people can be self-leaders. It doesn't mean they can't be group leaders too! They can! (my student is an important manager). Anyway, it's all just talk, and if you want to know what it was about, put it in a comment, and I'll repost the other blog.
But what I want to say in this blog is that, after beating myself up over it, after not being able to muster up the enthusiasm or even a sense of obligation to go to my art class - which I had assured my teacher I wouldn't miss, or the kermes at the neighbors' house, which I had promised to stop by and buy food at, or even cook up the meal I had said I would cook for my kids - and this is grave because we ended up eating nachos and popcorn all day... after all of that, I did shake it off! I pulled myself out of my own morbid negativity!
How, you ask? Well, first I bullied myself into doing my chores. I washed a thousand dishes and cleaned the stove. I felt like I was being punished, but in fact it was really my turn to do the kitchen, only I'd been moping around so much I'd let them accummulate to massive proportions. My back felt like hell at the end of it, but at least I knew I'd done something productive! Everyone congratulated me. It was like I'd really contributed to the cause (even though I hadn't cooked up the meal I'd promised, but then today is another day!)
Next, I participated in a family activity - we watched Matrix III, got incredibly bored with it and switched to Kramer vs Kramer - completely opposites in terms of genres but who cares? That was with popcorn, homemade lemonade, the works.
Then everyone went their own way - some to bed, some to parties, I myself decided to tackle the cuckoo clock. And that was the thing that brought me back to the good place I'm in now. It was hell! I surfed the net to find instructions, read them over a billion times, opened the back of our cuckoo clock, worked on it under the dim light of a florescent bulb, with my bad eyes straining to see the sprockets and chains which are hidden behind a metal barrier that cannot be removed. You have to stick a hook through the spaces in the metal and coax the chains over the sprockets. I didn't have a hook - but I had a toothpick and determination! When I put the clock back up and got it going - had to fiddle with the pendulum weight till it got the right rhythm - when I heard the cuckoo bird's call 15 minutes later at midnight - on the dot according to my watch! - I felt elated. And this morning, when I got up and discerned through the morning stillness the steady tick-tock of the cuckoo clock, I felt positively absolved! My bout with negativity was over!
The only thing I forgot is that, DST made the hour fall back, so my cuckoo says it's an hour later than it really is... but there's no way I'm going to change the hour now. Tomorrow will be soon enough!
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