tofallfromgrace.com : the blog

i must admit i am a first friday virgin…until this friday that is.

i was sitting outside today enjoying the beautiful weather and wondering about where i was headed. okay, enjoying the weather more than thinking, but it is all relative…when i am inside talking mindless sentences to random people and typing in endless numbers into cells and cells and cells, then i can think my personal thoughts. when outside i need to absorb the possibilities of the day and bring them into myself in order to survive.

most people just need coffee in the morning.

right then, this morning, drinking my coffee and daydreaming about days when i did not have to worry about if i use skim milk or half & half, sugar or splenda…that is when i saw a wretched black bird with a cigarette butt in its beak. it hopped onto a metal pole and then ducked into the rafters on the outside loading dock.

“this,” i thought to myself, “this is what life has come down to…a small, crazy-eyed bird making its nest out of the detritus of our everyday life.”

i have absoluetly no idea why.

but then again, i had an image of chickens making egg salad saturday night while playing mancala with jim.

yep.

Normally I would post things that have substance to them, however, I am going to post two funny customer service interactions that I hope you will enjoy as much as I did.

19 Stone Steps

Moses had walked into my OfficeMax, really I am not kidding, an elderly gentleman still of statue nursing a cane with flowing white hair complete with sandals, approached me. From his chizled face, he quickly got to the point. He needed a printer. You see he deciphers the bible (note this upholds my Moses claim). It must also be a color printer since he takes the bible and rewrites it for people to understand; dark maroon for the Lord’s words, maroon for the apostles, blue for the text and finally yellow for his comments. While I thought the color selection a little odd, he claimed to have a membership of 40,000 people that he sends these out for free. Ok. As we got to discussing printers, I came to the point in the sale where I give him the choices and wait for his decision. Once I had done this, he reared back a little, took one of his wrinkled hands to his chin and looked awestruck like the almighty was talking to him, then and there.
Still in the pose, he looks at me and says, “The brain doesn’t work quite as fast when you are 84.”
Not being one to miss an opportunity I reply, “Really, I can see the wheels turning.”
This immediately grabs his attention as he lowers his hand and looks at me with a wily look and smiles, then he says, “Oh, they are really moving.”
We both chuckle and I load up his machine choice. After paying for it, I push the cart out to his car. A purple four door hyanduai station wagon, a real man’s car, where I put the machine in the back seat.
He then catches my eye and says, “Well, my wife is going to have to carry that up our 19 stone steps.”
Never doubting that he had indeed counted each of those steps. He countined, “She’s healthier than I am, she’s only 82!”

The Shirt

A portly guy of short statue caught walking by an aisle by giving a yelp. Nothing like being yelled at like I dog, I thought as I answered his call. He gives me two empty ink cartridges that he needs help finding. So, I look at the cartridges, find their number (each cartridge has a specific number) and I hand them back to him. He looks at me puzzled and with a sense of amazement declares that he can’t see that well anymore. Ok, not a problem. As I take him to the ink aisle and give him his cartridges, I notice that he takes the package and almost rests it on his noise to see it. Hmm. He must have been right, he can’t see a damn thing. As he is doing this, I look down at his shirt. It is bright yellow and along the top it says,”Bolder Boulder”, ok, I don’t think he ran the race as I look farther down the shirt it says, in descending order, “2002 Race Offical Judge!” I almost lost it. I really wanted to ask him, if he had seen the finish and if it looked like a close finish to him.

to be so completely lost in yourself that you do not know what reality is? where you think to yourself one thing but the actions and reactions of others are so incredibly different from what you think they should be. when you start to wonder if maybe you are not in the right?

for so long i have tried to always see things from many different angles, to at least attempt to understand other person’s views even if they are the complete opposite of my own. i have also viewed myself as a high self-observer, trying to see the impact of my actions on others. what if all this time i have just been living in my own head and not actually seeing other people clearly, much less my own self?

the past month has been “rollercoaster-esque”, with all the highs and lows that implies. work has been insane; i moved to an apartment with one of my closest friends; i was offered a job at another company; and, last but not least, realized that i may be just a little insane. my thoughts of being lost in a reality of my own creation along with my habit of hurting those i feel closest to me whenever i am stressed…taking out my fear and anger at a billion other things on the people i depend on most….maybe not the most sane decision, no? saying sorry just does not do enough when you finally cross that line.

yes, yes…i know that many of you already knew this and you are probably wondering why it took me so long to catch on? well, i do not have an answer to that particular question…although, i do now know which came first, the chicken or the egg, and i am not going to share the answer with you.

so there.

as for playboy’s commentary on women vs men…well, women did not always have the option of killing things so we came up with a different way to express ourselves - talking. we talk to each other when we are happy, sad, angry, hurt, excited, depressed, lonely, scared, in love, falling out of love. not necessarily to scare away the animals.

although our tendancy to talk everything through does in fact tend to scare off one animal…man.

mood music…

we will have to wait

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