After a relentlessly awful week where I was always a step behind myself and working from early morning to late at night, I finally made it to the weekend. But it hasn't lived up to expectations so far.
I should admit first that I have a three day weekend - no classes on Friday - which makes me luckier than most people; except that in reality much of the weekend is filled with nagging anxiety about the things that need to be done before Monday, or with the doing of those things.
Yesterday, Friday, I cleaned all day. Last weekend I got back from a conference in Utah on Sunday evening and tipped the contents of my case over my bedroom floor, which was already in a state of advanced degradation after the previous week of teaching and writing. It got worse and worse as the week went on, so that by Thursday it felt as if I was walking over a particularly well-populated stretch of seabed, with miscellaneous seaweeds wrapping themselves around my ankles, carpet sharks nipping at my toes, and well-camouflaged but unfortunately fragile shellfish crunching underfoot. Something had to be done. I didn't expect it to take quite so many hours, though.
Today my alarm woke me at 7, and I had the by now familiar wave of anxiety followed by immense relief at the realisation that it was the weekend. The relief is shortlived at the moment, though, with so many things waiting to be done.
Still, I had some coffee and then went out for a run, and afterwards went to a pilates class - trying to make up for a week of physical inactivity in a day. Then I decided to go to the Mercury Cafe for brunch. I'd never been there, but I'd passed it on runs and have read about it on Happy Cow. I liked it - the interior makes the best of having no windows by having strings of little lights and interesting decor, and if like me you are sick to death of the monotonous sunny glare of Colorado it is nice to find yourself inside an enchanted cave.
The food was pretty good, I'd say. Only, I had huevos rancheros, the dish I can never resist on a menu in the way that my mother can never resist steak and kidney pie. She is almost always disappointed by it, as I am with my huevos. The problem for me is that I always want it to be what I had at the Stockyard Cafe in Bozeman, Montana before I had ever heard of huevos rancheros. It was called huevos gringos, and was (as far as I remember) black beans and eggs sandwiched between flour tortillas and covered in salsa and cheese. It was the first time that I could see a point to a cooked breakfast. It's the cold salsa that makes the difference. Every time my huevos rancheros arrives and is smothered in some kind of hot chile I realise it isn't what I was hoping for.
And there was (typically) far too much. I ate half of it, and then packed the other half into a little box to take home. I don't want to take my food home! I want to eat the whole thing and perhaps feel that I had just a little more than I needed. I don't want to eat more than I needed and then still have half a plate left. What to do? I can't bear the waste of leaving it and having it thrown out. But who wants to face breakfast again later in the day? I carried it dutifully around town, and then when I was almost home a couple of men asked me if I could help them out with something to eat, and I handed it over to them. Presumably they meant, can you give us some money? And maybe this is where my bad karma began today; but as I see it, if they really needed the food then they have something that was burdensome to me; and if they really meant, can you give us some money so that we can go across to one of those dodgy stores on Colfax and buy some cheap beer, then they can throw my breakfast away and we are none of us really any worse off than before.
But here is the real bad karma story:
I went out in the late afternoon and got my car, came back and picked up my mountains of dirty washing, and drove down to the coin laundry on 11th. It's opposite Wild Oats, so I can do my heavy shopping at the same time. Once it was all done and I was ready to go home, I tried to pull out of the rather cramped parking lot, and as I did so I heard a slight sound as I was swinging around the back bumper of the black car next to me. It was so slight, though, I didn't think much of it - either I'd driven over something scrunchy, or I'd just touched lightly on my neighbour's bumper. On the way home I wondered more and more about it, though, and once back I looked at my front bumper and found it scratched and with faint lines of black... so, being the infuriatingly (to me) morally upright and honest person my parents have saddled me with being, I got back in the car and drove back to the laundry to see if I could find the person and apologize and offer to pay for it. He'd gone, though. I hung around in front of the place grading papers for half an hour or so hoping he'd come back and free me from my evening's burden of guilt; but he never did. I had to ring Uncle Eric to get him to try to make me feel better about it.
Earlier in the day I had a text message from someone I haven't been in touch with for some time now. She said she hoped all was well, since she had had "the same dramatic dream" about me two nights in a row. I almost hesitated to get into my car earlier, but did it in part because I thought I would lose respect for myself if I let this kind of Ides of March nonsense influence my actions at all. Let it be noted now that even if I die tonight I would still call it coincidence; and that if something worse had happened earlier, then it would either have been coincidence or an accident brought on by jumpiness because of the message itself. Supposed prescience can cause all sorts of things it predicts, I think.
So, how can I so easily dismiss prescience, but not karma? For me karma isn't something supernatural - it is an entirely practical matter. If I left that parking lot, and the owner of the car came back a moment later and noticed that scratches had just appeared across his bumper and that the person who did it didn't bother to stop and apologize, then I think it would be reasonable for him to be angry about it, and I am responsible for causing just a little more anger to be released into the world. Like the old thing about a butterfly flapping its wings causing a storm thousands of miles away, it seems to me that just that small amount of anger could, in the end, contribute to wars or genocide...
OK, it probably won't. But I'm sorry, anonymous person in black car!
I should admit first that I have a three day weekend - no classes on Friday - which makes me luckier than most people; except that in reality much of the weekend is filled with nagging anxiety about the things that need to be done before Monday, or with the doing of those things.
Yesterday, Friday, I cleaned all day. Last weekend I got back from a conference in Utah on Sunday evening and tipped the contents of my case over my bedroom floor, which was already in a state of advanced degradation after the previous week of teaching and writing. It got worse and worse as the week went on, so that by Thursday it felt as if I was walking over a particularly well-populated stretch of seabed, with miscellaneous seaweeds wrapping themselves around my ankles, carpet sharks nipping at my toes, and well-camouflaged but unfortunately fragile shellfish crunching underfoot. Something had to be done. I didn't expect it to take quite so many hours, though.
Today my alarm woke me at 7, and I had the by now familiar wave of anxiety followed by immense relief at the realisation that it was the weekend. The relief is shortlived at the moment, though, with so many things waiting to be done.
Still, I had some coffee and then went out for a run, and afterwards went to a pilates class - trying to make up for a week of physical inactivity in a day. Then I decided to go to the Mercury Cafe for brunch. I'd never been there, but I'd passed it on runs and have read about it on Happy Cow. I liked it - the interior makes the best of having no windows by having strings of little lights and interesting decor, and if like me you are sick to death of the monotonous sunny glare of Colorado it is nice to find yourself inside an enchanted cave.
The food was pretty good, I'd say. Only, I had huevos rancheros, the dish I can never resist on a menu in the way that my mother can never resist steak and kidney pie. She is almost always disappointed by it, as I am with my huevos. The problem for me is that I always want it to be what I had at the Stockyard Cafe in Bozeman, Montana before I had ever heard of huevos rancheros. It was called huevos gringos, and was (as far as I remember) black beans and eggs sandwiched between flour tortillas and covered in salsa and cheese. It was the first time that I could see a point to a cooked breakfast. It's the cold salsa that makes the difference. Every time my huevos rancheros arrives and is smothered in some kind of hot chile I realise it isn't what I was hoping for.
And there was (typically) far too much. I ate half of it, and then packed the other half into a little box to take home. I don't want to take my food home! I want to eat the whole thing and perhaps feel that I had just a little more than I needed. I don't want to eat more than I needed and then still have half a plate left. What to do? I can't bear the waste of leaving it and having it thrown out. But who wants to face breakfast again later in the day? I carried it dutifully around town, and then when I was almost home a couple of men asked me if I could help them out with something to eat, and I handed it over to them. Presumably they meant, can you give us some money? And maybe this is where my bad karma began today; but as I see it, if they really needed the food then they have something that was burdensome to me; and if they really meant, can you give us some money so that we can go across to one of those dodgy stores on Colfax and buy some cheap beer, then they can throw my breakfast away and we are none of us really any worse off than before.
But here is the real bad karma story:
I went out in the late afternoon and got my car, came back and picked up my mountains of dirty washing, and drove down to the coin laundry on 11th. It's opposite Wild Oats, so I can do my heavy shopping at the same time. Once it was all done and I was ready to go home, I tried to pull out of the rather cramped parking lot, and as I did so I heard a slight sound as I was swinging around the back bumper of the black car next to me. It was so slight, though, I didn't think much of it - either I'd driven over something scrunchy, or I'd just touched lightly on my neighbour's bumper. On the way home I wondered more and more about it, though, and once back I looked at my front bumper and found it scratched and with faint lines of black... so, being the infuriatingly (to me) morally upright and honest person my parents have saddled me with being, I got back in the car and drove back to the laundry to see if I could find the person and apologize and offer to pay for it. He'd gone, though. I hung around in front of the place grading papers for half an hour or so hoping he'd come back and free me from my evening's burden of guilt; but he never did. I had to ring Uncle Eric to get him to try to make me feel better about it.
Earlier in the day I had a text message from someone I haven't been in touch with for some time now. She said she hoped all was well, since she had had "the same dramatic dream" about me two nights in a row. I almost hesitated to get into my car earlier, but did it in part because I thought I would lose respect for myself if I let this kind of Ides of March nonsense influence my actions at all. Let it be noted now that even if I die tonight I would still call it coincidence; and that if something worse had happened earlier, then it would either have been coincidence or an accident brought on by jumpiness because of the message itself. Supposed prescience can cause all sorts of things it predicts, I think.
So, how can I so easily dismiss prescience, but not karma? For me karma isn't something supernatural - it is an entirely practical matter. If I left that parking lot, and the owner of the car came back a moment later and noticed that scratches had just appeared across his bumper and that the person who did it didn't bother to stop and apologize, then I think it would be reasonable for him to be angry about it, and I am responsible for causing just a little more anger to be released into the world. Like the old thing about a butterfly flapping its wings causing a storm thousands of miles away, it seems to me that just that small amount of anger could, in the end, contribute to wars or genocide...
OK, it probably won't. But I'm sorry, anonymous person in black car!
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