What does that administrative coordinator do? Anything that the administrative coordinator knows how to do. The Pine Valley Water delivery guy comes in (water coolers, bottled water for the store) and finds me in the teachers lounge, on the way to the storage room. "Boy, you do everything around here." I am sanding down joint compound that I applied last week to some holes in the drywall. We don't have classes Thursday day, so it's my chance to make noise and fix things. We had had these plastic wall pockets up from a failed orginizational system designed to track potential students. Their removal damaged the wall, hence the joint compound. The pine valley guy thought I was gay for a bit, but the manly persona of t-shirt and joint compound seems to have reassured him a bit. I had tried to talk sports with him once which led him to the conclusion that I was hitting on him, hahaha, life can be so dumb sometimes.
So in the "year off" I took between High School and college I worked construction under Ed Fitzwilliam. Ed worked off the books and paid me eight dollars an hour to be his apprentice. He was at times a zen master, and in the realm of drywall he taught me, "hit it and get away from it." Meaning simply to leave my perfectionism and constant reworking of things at the door, simply do and move on. Would that I could apply that philosophy to the rest of my life.
If you live your life always trying to do you best, then you have nothing to regret, as you know that you've done your best in all situations. I have not done my best in all situations and hence I live with the regret of being emotionally dumb. Perhaps this is true of most people; small consolation as it is your own garden you must tend (wow have I injested new age platitudes).
Nancy is watering the plants, she just changed the water in the woven bamboo on the file cabinete. Nacy is the the store worker/ secretary who replaced emily - we've moved emily to nights as she was competant but did not have the disposition of someone you want answering the phones. Nancy is not competant in a balance the cash drawer kind of way, but she is very sweet and also a Reiki Master, so we have her do energy work on us when we need it - which is frequently. (seeing auras, working on the energy field, clearing chakras, prophetic dreams, etc. are all commonplaces in my working environment). Nancy is like me in that she has a madness about her, she likes Gin martinis and tells wonderfull stories about her life - she's in her late fifties/early sixties. The other moring she brought me a bear claw and a coffee aand we sat in her new van in the parking lot before anyone else got here, and she told me the story about the man who chased her from Wisconsin to where she was staying in arkansaw, he banged on the door of her trailer and demanded to know who she was in there with - he had a gun. She was in the trailer wioth another women, not another man, not a woman she was "with". She ends the story by saying, "sweet guy, glad he didn't shoot me" that's Nancy. "I didn't think I was going to live to see thirty, so I felt I had tro cram it all in. I destoryed my body with the thought that I was going to use up every last cell, burn it all. And then I just kept living. The body has an amaising capacity to heal."
I hope I am making forward progress - hope I'm on some path to a more mature self, a better version of me. Nancy is a help in that regard - she has a copmpassionate and wise nature - as regards the self obsession Karl - hit it and get away from it. Simply do it.
Personal tragedy, Linda, Don & Ellie's, Christine Chris & Rowan's, Clair's, Glenn, Virgil and Shgirley, the family of the killer, Mary Bryant's family and her wide circle of friends, everyone that knows them and holds them in their hearts.... After visitng India a friend said to me, "In every glance you see somthing beautiful and somthing horifying, children's legs having been broken by their parents in order to beg effectivly from tourists - the joy that people are capable of and can bring to one another through service, compassion, and laughter" Life is always like that I guess, beauty and horror.