Day 577

Yesterday was not a good day. Tomorrow it will be exactly 18 months since Dad died. In that time, it has become evident that I can’t seem to catch a break. It’s as if the universe has cast an unbreakable curse over me, a curse ensuring that the dark clouds hovering above are unable to part. It’s not like I was lucky before he died, but now it’s as if my bad luck has gotten worse. I am stuck. No movement at all is possible no matter how hard I try. In fact, it feels kind of like quicksand, the harder I try to extract myself — move forward, make a dent — the fiercer the quicksand sucks me in. Even focusing on the positive. Thinking happy thoughts full of gumdrops and rainbows and dreams coming true has not loosened its hold. I envision things finally going well, my life reaching a point of stability, and then the earthquake strikes. I open my eyes and reality returns. 

Okay, that was a really long roundabout way of saying, I did not get the job that I was so insanely confident would be mine. Are you surprised? I’m not. If anything I’m surprised that I had allowed myself to get to the point of actually feeling excited, of allowing my son to feed off my excitement. We were making plans for all the things we’d be able to do once I had a pay check. Well, be that a lesson to me. Being high on optimism doesn’t mean things will get better, only that the fall back to really will hurt more. A lot more.

I didn’t get the job. So I wasn’t exactly in the best of moods when I took my son to Taekwondo. During the class, he sparred a much taller — and older — boy. My son can hold his own when sparring traditionally. However, combat sparring (hitting each other with padded sticks) a taller kid has an advantage when it comes to leverage. The kid, repeatedly hit my son over the head whack-a-mole style until my son — tears in his eyes — screamed at him to stop because he was hurting him. I am not a fan of combat sparring, not since the first, or second, time I did it and one of the men in class gave me a concussion by whacking me repeatedly. When my son woke up this morning his head still hurt.

My day couldn’t possibly get worse, right?  HA! Of course it could. From Taekowndo I drove my son to Boy Scouts. Part of being a Scout is doing volunteer work to benefit the community. One of the nice things about scouting. However, while we were waiting for all the boys to show up, one kid told my son and another boy that he was finally getting to go back to school tomorrow. He said that he had been out of school since last week because he was quarantined. What? If he couldn’t go to school because he was quarantined, then what the hell was he doing at Boy Scouts (both Monday and Tuesday)? But I didn’t say anything. I didn’t complain because my son desperately wants friends. He wants to feel as if he belongs. And in today’s society, right and wrong isn’t determined by the deed done, but by the committee of people weighing in and deciding who is right or who is wrong. It is a popularity contest. Those who are most popular can do whatever the hell they want without consequence. The rest of us pay the price. This is why my spouse and I had been so adamant about vaccinating our son. We knew society well enough to know that people were not going to do what they needed to do to keep everyone else safe. People in America operate from a position of selfishness. What is best for me, not what is best for everyone. Maybe it isn’t just America, but America is where I live so its what I can attest to best. I’m only glad my son is vaccinated, otherwise, I think I’d have been more furious at the risk this other kid presented.