I often hear people say things like, "of course that would happen to me..." and as I've thought about it, I don't know that it's really unusual to think of oneself as an outsider to the general stream of humanity. For me it's been a variety of things: being a pastor's daughter, being a Christian, being part of a unique and dynamic (and wacky?!) family, or the cultural unawareness that comes with not watching many TV shows/R-rated movies. But it can be all sorts of things for folks, I think: medical conditions, physical characteristics, family story, whatever. It's like we think if that characteristic/set of characteristics were different, life would somehow be "normal". It took me quite a while to figure out that the majority of people feel like they're part of a unique minority for some reason or another.
Life for me has been fairly uneventful lately, not particularly by my choice. I had three awesome things lined up this weekend, and it was killing me that doing one meant missing the other two: my cousin Steve got married, my church did a mini-work trip in St. Louis, and it was Canoecopia in Madison. The wedding won out, but none of the plans I had made for it to be workable came through, so I ended up figuring that it just would have been pushing it too much to go. Then I got sick Thursday, and so watched hopes of St. Louis, and then Canoecopia dissipate. The funny thing is, I really have nothing to complain about - I got to watch the Badgers/hang out with friends yesterday, catch up with Amy on the phone and go rambling with Tammy today, get my hair cut tonight, and generally just clean and get caught up on rest and stuff. This is a dilemma I often face. Who likes complainers? I'm BUMMED - for real - that I missed out on those very-cool-marvelous-awesome things! And yet, how can I possibly, remotely have any valid reason for upsetness? If any of you have figured that one out, I'd seriously love to hear it. It's like after our apartment fire: it was majorly bitey to lose pretty much everything. But within a week, due to peoples' incredible generosity and the fact that I still had a job, I was back to having more possessions than probably 80% of the world can claim. What do you do with those conflicting emotions that somehow don't average out to any one feeling or perspective?
In light of these observations, here are a couple misadventures that I thought it'd be fun to share. I've back-posted them to the dates they occurred, but I'm hoping that with all of above as disclaimer, they won't sound too complainy! Notice I'm NOT claiming that, "of course, this WOULD happen to ME"... :)
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