The Blessed Curse

Pain 

is a fleeting thing

much like joy

love and laughter.

but the measure of a man

is not what he was,

but what he is now.

and what he will be tomorrow.

life is a moment

that lasts many years.

and it holds much pain

despair and heartache.
One feels lost

and alone.

but there is love

given away in buckets.

never received.

always just given.

but the love is there

in all the mended hearts,

the restored smiles,

the soothed souls.
where there is love

there is hope.

you just have to stand back and let it all in.
in every smile you save,

in every heart you remake,

in all the broken pieces you pick up

and make whole again.

in every new hope you create,

there is a person

who will love again.

there is no better payment anyone can receive.

your curse

is not the curse that it seems.

it's a blessing in disguise

seen only by the other souls

you save.

so turn the blessed curse inward

because

how can you keep saving others

when you don't save yourself?

Monday - A Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day!*

As Mondays go, today was a really crappy one. Literally crappy because I had to wake up at 5 am to remove two large piles of dog poo off the kitchen floor. I went back to sleep because I didn't want to start my week on poop duty. But then I woke up late and didn't have enough time to shower or have any breakfast before I went to work. This made me grumpy (and no shower meant I was slightly sticky because I sweated in the night) so I was sticky and grumpy and hungry. Since I didn't have time to make breakfast, I had to buy mediocre sausage buns from a tiny bakery on my way to work. This did not alleviate my grouchiness.

Then when I got to work, a couple of people decided to show me the corpses of two pigeons that had gotten into the canteen and then either starved to death over the two day Vesak holiday or smashed themselves to death against the glass doors. I looked because I thought they were going to show me a puppy. It was NOT a puppy. Not even close. I wailed inside my head, 'WHY? WHY WOULD YOU SHOW ME THIS FIRST THING IN THE MORNING? WHY WOULD YOU SHOW ME THIS AT ALL???' But I didn't wail out loud because one of them was taking a picture of the poor dead bird. Such macarbness on a Monday morning! And come to think of it, in retrospect, quite fitting I suppose. It has been a dead bird picture kind of day.

There was a brief respite in the horribleness that was today when I got to my desk because a coworker had kindly gotten me a box of goodies - a cupcake, an eclair and a macaroon - to say thank you for finding her a nice hotel to stay at in Hikkaduwa. It was sweet of her and I was touched. I then went and made a cup of coffee like I do on mornings that I don't take coffee to work. But before I could drink it, I was ambushed by three different students and I had to deal with them so long that my coffee was cold by the time I got to it. I had to drink it cold because we have no microwave at work. And I was hungry so I had to eat my disappointing sausage buns. They we not delicious. Not even a little bit. They filled me up but did not please me.

Because of everything that happened in the morning, I thought I deserved to eat an eclair for breakfast. Having cheered up a bit at the prospect, I took a bite of the eclair in my goodie box only to find that the cream inside it had gone sour. I wasn't sure if it had cream cheese icing inside so I decided to leave the rest of the eclair on the table in the middle of the room for another unsuspecting soul to take a bite and confirm whether or not it was off. A friend took a bite. It was indeed off. I had to throw my eclair away. This was the most heartbreaking thing I had to do in a long time.

I should probably mention right about now that I missed a trip to Jaffna with my friends because of my students. They didn't turn up for classes all week last week so I had to stay back to teach them to make sure they won't flunk their quiz on the 28th. Not only were the rat bastards not there at the time the class was supposed to start, they were an hour late, and half of them didn't turn up for class at all! The unfairness of it all!!! I could have been in Jaffna right now! Gah!!!

I finally decided to cut my losses and come home. But then I got out of the bus a few stops early so I could go to my movie store and buy a copy of the Lego movie. I felt I could use some Lego awesomeness to brighten up my day. The movie shop didn't have it. Nor did they have anything else I wanted. And I found out that the movie where Tom Hiddleston voices a young James Hook (That I was incidentally waiting to watch) is for children aged 4-10. Such sadness! So I bought something I didn't really want and came home. Did I mention that I almost fell in a pothole in the middle of the pavement on my way home?? It was not there last Friday and I just managed not to fall in, but it was a near miss.

And finally, the horrible, fake, bottled cherry on top of the margarine based, eggless cake that was my day was that I just finished a class with a student who was not interested in a word I had to say! He looks everywhere but at me when I teach him, doodles and scribbles and mutters when I ask him questions, and stares blankly into the distance when I try to see if he understood something. He is one of the more frustrating, annoying, irritating people I have taught and he's too old to smack. I just got away.

Today has been a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day! So I thought, 'SCREW THIS' and looked at text from dog and laughed hysterically for 15 minutes. Then I decided to vent in a blog post. Which resulted in this little gem. My day just got a wee bit better. So I have now decided that I'm going to eat and sleep while I am ahead of things. I really hope that tomorrow will be kinder or I am not getting out of bed!

*The title for this post is a modified version of the title of the book Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible,No Good, Very Bad Day by Judith Viorst.

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