Something's in the air
I'm a pretty sensitive person, not necessarily in an emotional or empathetic way, but in that I'm particularly susceptible to sensory overload: loud noises, bright lights, unpleasant odors, extreme temperatures -- they all seem to affect me more intensely than seems normal. So now, with all the damn mulch everywhere, I'm a mess. It's giving me headaches; it's made me lose my appetite and, at home, where the mulch smell is coupled with the aroma of our neighbor's pot smoking and the sounds and smells of home improvement (e.g., hammering, painting, various sawdust-creating activities as they apply our siding), it's even worse.
And yet.
I've been in a better mood the past couple of days than I've been in weeks. I didn't hate coming to work this morning. And, despite being a misanthrope (but not, as Minnams and I debated a couple of weeks ago, a cynic or a curmudgeon) at heart, I had two separate encounters in the span of about 10 minutes yesterday when I decided that maybe people don't suck. Amazing.
Yesterday was school board election day in NJ; the school where we vote is right down the street from our house, so I drove home and then walked over to the school. A couple of houses away from ours, a woman was handing out little flyers about her lost dog, saying he'd been spotted in the area the day before (he's been missing at least two weeks at this point). There were two women out on a walk, plus me, on the sidewalk, and all of us listened and sympathized and pointed out that it was encouraging that he'd at least been spotted, and we promised to keep our eyes peeled and call. And it just felt awfully nice, a handful of strangers expressing kindnesses, because I feel like that doesn't happen so much anymore.
The more superficial "people don't suck" encounter was at the actual polling site, where the woman who signed me in complimented my engagement ring, noting that it's "a very attractive shape." Which is sort of a weird thing to say, I think, and I was taken a little off guard. I've been wearing this ring for almost three years now, and although the phrase, "Yes, it's an asscher cut with trapezoids on the sides," really rolled off my tongue when we first got engaged, not so much, anymore. But it made me happy, because I do love my engagement ring, and now that it's such a part of me that I can go for ages without really noticing it, so it's fun to really look at it again, and feel a little girly and excited about having this sparkly, shiny object to stare at.
Anyway, today at work, people largely continued not to suck (with a couple of notable exceptions, but I'm feeling fairly Zen about it now), and several of my co-workers actually remarked that they've felt in a bit of a funk lately, but that it's lifted in the last day or so.
And several of us have hypothesized that it might somehow be the mulch that's driving all of this positive energy. Which seems like sort of an evil, ironic plot, but I'll take it.
And yet.
I've been in a better mood the past couple of days than I've been in weeks. I didn't hate coming to work this morning. And, despite being a misanthrope (but not, as Minnams and I debated a couple of weeks ago, a cynic or a curmudgeon) at heart, I had two separate encounters in the span of about 10 minutes yesterday when I decided that maybe people don't suck. Amazing.
Yesterday was school board election day in NJ; the school where we vote is right down the street from our house, so I drove home and then walked over to the school. A couple of houses away from ours, a woman was handing out little flyers about her lost dog, saying he'd been spotted in the area the day before (he's been missing at least two weeks at this point). There were two women out on a walk, plus me, on the sidewalk, and all of us listened and sympathized and pointed out that it was encouraging that he'd at least been spotted, and we promised to keep our eyes peeled and call. And it just felt awfully nice, a handful of strangers expressing kindnesses, because I feel like that doesn't happen so much anymore.
The more superficial "people don't suck" encounter was at the actual polling site, where the woman who signed me in complimented my engagement ring, noting that it's "a very attractive shape." Which is sort of a weird thing to say, I think, and I was taken a little off guard. I've been wearing this ring for almost three years now, and although the phrase, "Yes, it's an asscher cut with trapezoids on the sides," really rolled off my tongue when we first got engaged, not so much, anymore. But it made me happy, because I do love my engagement ring, and now that it's such a part of me that I can go for ages without really noticing it, so it's fun to really look at it again, and feel a little girly and excited about having this sparkly, shiny object to stare at.
Anyway, today at work, people largely continued not to suck (with a couple of notable exceptions, but I'm feeling fairly Zen about it now), and several of my co-workers actually remarked that they've felt in a bit of a funk lately, but that it's lifted in the last day or so.
And several of us have hypothesized that it might somehow be the mulch that's driving all of this positive energy. Which seems like sort of an evil, ironic plot, but I'll take it.
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