I've been auditioning for a feature film this week!
It's a dramedy about a woman's week-long series of screwy mishaps and strange luck. It opens, for instance, with the woman getting stopped by a state trooper for a broken headlight and pulling away 45 minutes later with a warrant and nearly $400 in tickets.
As most of these plot formulas go, her world continues to unravel one stitch and one day at a time: losing a long-standing client; an escalating snide-fest with a snarling neighbor; a mysterious cootie-rash on her dog's undercarriage, which leads to a ridiculous conversation with the vet about doggie VD; finding herself locked in a warehouse stairwell; receiving an ominous phone message from an IRS agent; a close call with hellacious halitosis; and a stabbing announcement that, indeed, her kids favored Daddy. There's even a scene where she absently drives off with her car still tethered to a gas pump.
By week's end, she buoys her nerves and her will in a murky bath of whiskey, energy drinks, turtle sundaes and lots of quick conversations with God. Through it all, she tries to remain open to hearing the lyrics of the universe and drinking from its wisdom gourd.
Or maybe not.
On closer inspection, maybe this scripted comedy of errors is not a laugh-track path to enlightenment. Maybe her crappy week was just ... a crappy week. Maybe the eight-blocks she walked uphill in the biting rain after she was unable to coax her car's engine into action was just her Bad Day assignment. Like substitute teaching, you just never know whether Central Office is deploying you into a classroom of cherubs or banshees.
Maybe, there is not always a cosmic message in every experience. I should know about these things; I've become conditioned to look for them. Ever since I was introduced to the notion of Everything Happens As it Should, When it Should, I've gotten to be pretty good at finding Silver Linings and Hidden Truths anywhere.
The Neanderthal a**hole that has no neurons of empathy? I'm the one to explain how his bravado is simply shield to hide his wounded heart. The tragically unconfident waif who can't seem make a self-respecting decision at any turn? I'm the one who'll champion her will to do better, be stronger, even though her actions haven't caught up with her yet. The worst week ever? Never you mind. This is just a universal contract of energy exchanging between my soul and ... oh ... I forget it. It's just a crap week.
Not a galactic guidepost. Not coded message from the ancestors. Not an affirmation from the divine. Although I know such dialogues with the universe occur, I can't convert their reality into an all-purpose salve. Can't always make things conveniently cosmic.
Sometimes, it's simply my turn to have a crap-ass week.
I accepted this, with surprising ease, just before I fell asleep inside that stairwell, I think. No celestial commandments this time. No angel whispers. No sparkly soul-shifting epiphanies. No nothing to make this bad day somehow more special.
I guess my movie deal won't be happening, either. No worries. Once I got settled at home, I was able to discern a forthcoming blessing inside magic hollows of the wind that reflect themselves against the jasper stones I rub right after meditation and prayer under the smoke vapors of lavender right before sprinkling the inside of my wrists with mercury-infused spirit water ...
