> We found the perfect apartment, had our hearts
> set on it, decided to sleep on it one night,
> and were scooped the next morning by another
> couple. Heartbroken.
Aw, dang.
> Bittersweet afterthought: Do you ever just
> look at the world sometimes and think,
> "it does not need to be like this." ?
Perpetually. :-)
My wife has had to heard me say "Why can't this world just fucking *work*?!?!!!?" countless times. And I'm not talking about overt evil, but rather Murphy's tendency to require something that takes a couple minutes to accomplish to be preceded by a prerequisite that one would never have thought of as being a prerequisite, e.g.:
- Finding an attachment/battery/key/combination.
- Learning the damned thing somehow doesn't work for the first time ever, therein taking gobs of tedious time to debug.
- After 30 minutes of dishes, with a just a few minutes to spare before something one was really looking forward to commences, there's just one dish left, but reaching for it leads to spilling something that takes another 20 minutes to clean up.
(It occurs to me that this world could be pretty damned amazing sans "Murphy's Law" and "The Eternal September"....)
inquiry
A couple additional examples that happened just this morning as I was trying to accomplish a few home repair/upgrade thingies:
- In the basement are a couple panes of window glass that have fallen a bit in the frame, letting cold air in. So I wanted to measure those panes to glue something transparent over them to cover those air-friendly spaces. But it was a difficult reach with the tape measure due to circumstances that would be too difficult to describe in text. However, Murphy came to help by causing the end of the tape measure to enter and catch one of those openings in a way that I couldn't wiggle it out. In fact, wiggling made it *worse*, somehow causing that tape measure end to bury itself even more deeply... so I had to disrupt the flow of the measuring in order to struggle into a cobweb-infested space in order to get close enough to the situation to effect meaningful change. But as described earlier in this thread, the nature of the overall situation was that measuring a couple window panes should have taken about 20 seconds.. but I spent a solid 5 minutes struggling to free the effing end of the effing tape measure from a space that I couldn't *intentionally* thread (with that tape measure end) in a million years. But for Murph it's just BOOM! LET THE FRUSTRATION FLOOD IN UNABATED, BABY!!!
- At some point I was carrying a couple things in my right hand, including a sweatshirt I'd removed and a hammer. I kind of had my right hand positioned about mid chest to keep the sweatshirt from dragging.. but Murphy *tripped me* :-) in a way that I stepped on the sweatshirt, leading to some imbalance, leading to pounding the bottom of the hammer handle into my chin during the recoil/correction.
tetris
it's kind of horrifying and inspiring in some way to know that we, individually and collectively, are somehow still alive despite ourselves :-D
inquiry
I'm as horrified some are still alive as I am inspired some others are.... >_<