Moose in the Kitchen

Sometimes I have trouble dealing with the world. It insists on badgering my psyche into tremulous emotions. Like the ones you get from those movies where the heroine du jour is crying in the rain to a soundtrack by Deathcab for Cutie, and you eat up every second of it, allowing your tormented soul to be buffeted this way and that, because you’re a total pansy who’s easily manipulated by Hollywood executives with large montage budgets.

Today the world is buffeting me. I’m letting it, because I don’t know how to shut it off. I don’t want to shut it off, but I also don’t want to be buffeted at will. This is a conundrum that possibly requires therapy.

Good

I walked to work this morning in the sunshine, tapping the dog on the butt with my purse when, after being told to sit, she lowered her reluctant behind a cursory two inches (falling six inches short of the ground, where her butt should have been), and getting a kiss goodbye before heading downtown. (Not from the dog. She would have kissed me but she was too busy licking the sidewalk.)

Bad

As I’m turning on my computer at work, I hear a coworker’s pet theory. “There’s going to be nuclear war within two years.”

A little later, from a different coworker, “You never know when you’re going to need to flee the country. Who knows what will happen in the next ten years?”

My heart tends to quietly stutter at statements such as these, spiralling into doom and destruction of the Matrix type, until I can reason with myself that it’s far more likely that I or my friends or family will die in a horrendous car accident than under a nuclear warhead. (Call me sick, but this always cheers me up. Especially when confronted with the possibility of apocalyptic disaster. At least until I have to drive down the freeway again.)

Also Bad

Still slightly shaken by the whole nuclear war thing, I head to the kitchen to find the comics. On the front page of the comics section is a cozy little story about a priest raping children while their parents slept peacefully upstairs.

Summary

Someone please make it stop. I hate not knowing what’s going on in the world, I know that burying your head in the sand is the way to end up on a train going nowhere good, but I also need to function. Preferably without large quantities of mind-numbing drugs.

Life refuses to placate me by turning into fields of pink unicorns and chocolate chip cookies. Intellectually, I understand that you have to accept the bad with the good, and handle each as best you can. Viscerally, my anxiety kicks up because I tend to personalize everything from rapacious priests (I will have children someday – arm them with guns! and crosses in case of vampires!) to nuclear war (can I move everyone I know and everyone they know to Siberia? where no one wants to drop a bomb?). Stories of pain and destruction will always be around. But so will stories like this. Often these stories are happening at the same time.

Conclusion

The world is schizophrenic. Learn to like it. Read blogs.

Explanation of that blog thing

Blogs fill a gap left by newspapers. Newspapers with business models that don’t include featuring rescued puppies and cavorting kittens on page one. Everyday life doesn’t always include pain and destruction, but that’s what I see reflected in much of the mainstream media. Many of those stories are good to know. Many of them are not. Some of them I feel bad ignoring, because there are people who have suffered and the least I can do is acknowledge it. But there’s still that Needing to Function thing. We may yet be annihilated. There will always be people without soul or conscience. But everyday life can be very reassuring. So please excuse me while I go read about the pets, winter coats and small triumphs of bloggers.

Steps off soapbox to go eat cookies. You know, before all the cookies are torched by NUCLEAR BOMBS.

Sorry.

Instead of trying to make sense of anything I say, go here for a story of the good, the bad, and how often the bad can be helped with food. Specifically, fried Indian food.