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".
