"Moon"

I woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning, and then spent a stupid amount of time thinking about that expression, then thought about why things that bothered me before have suddenly become intolerable.  This must happen to others or the expression wouldn't exist, right?  Let's blame it on the phase of the moon.

I've spent the last couple of days doing some heavy lifting and cleaning.  Maybe all that effort broke down defenses that I didn't realize I had in place?  I fell asleep early from exhaustion and my dreams wouldn't leave me alone.  Maybe part of it was from a comment a friend made the other day.  He said nasty people say awful things to nice people because they know the nice people won't say awful things back.

Too true.  Bullies often win.  But it's a new year, I'm sweeping the dust, rearranging furniture, and somewhere in all this I'm tired of licking wounds that never heal.  I'm not much for New Year resolutions, but I am resolving to quit putting up with people who don't add value to my life.

There are nice, good people in the world.  If you've been blessed to spend your life around those kinds of people, I hope you appreciate them.  If you've spent your life around un-nice people, well, go find the nice ones.

Back in the olden days when children got muddy and played on the playground without safety equipment, we played on teeter totters.  Not the wimpy, plastic rockers that they sell these days, but long, hard, wood constructions.  I loved them.  Proper seesawing meant you needed to have at least one comparably-sized friend to play with.  If you were really social, you could put 2-3 friends on each end.  And yes, in those days the girls did this in dresses (though this pic is from before my time).

Back and forth, back and forth... and then when one of the players had been lulled into complacency... jump off!  If you did this right, your friend would be at the apex of the rocking cycle and suddenly crash to Earth in a tailbone smashing impact... with a bounce and a secondary crack to the coccyx.

Most often we laughed and the victim would laughingly vow vengeance.  The first perpetrator would get their comeuppance, though if you were really on the ball you could jump off before impact.  Once in a while the collision would actually harm a kid (which I suppose is why today's kids have plastic rockers) and the kids on the playground would sympathetically gather around the kid rolling on the ground with a broken tailbone while a teacher was found for her usually unsympathetic supervision.

This was all important education about the laws of Newtonian physics because we were living "for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction".

My New Year's resolution is to jump off the seesaw.  What's yours?