what I said

So I did send off a small donation yesterday afternoon.

And what happens this morning? A textbook publisher I've worked with before wants to hire me to do accuracy checking/proofreading.

Odd how that works. (And the pay for this one is GOOD. I really hope it works out with my schedule - it's work I'm good at, and in a weird, compulsive way, I enjoy.)

****

I don't know. I don't really believe in "karma" (and anyway, the Hindu/Buddhist concept of karma is NOT "you do something nice, something nice comes back to you) and I don't even really believe that there's some kind of cosmic quid pro quo where you get rewarded for stuff like that.

But I do think in some ways, you get back what you put in. For example, I try to look for the good in people. There are very, very few people (I can count on one hand and have fingers left over) that I know in person that I would say I dislike enough to want to avoid them 100% of the time. Oh, most people have some personality traits I wish were different or they do things I sometimes find grating, but I know I have personality traits other people wish were different and I do things other people find grating. But I'm mostly able to give people the benefit of the doubt. The side effect of this is that I do seem to have a  lot of, if not exactly CLOSE friends*, friendly acquaintances, and I tend to like most people - to the point where, when I hear someone complaining about someone we mutually know, I go to myself, "Huh. I never noticed that about that person before, and it really doesn't seem like a problem to me."

And as a result, most people seem to like me. Or at least, they don't go to lengths to avoid me, and I certainly don't catch any of the horrible teasing/meanness/rejection/avoidance I got from peers as a kid.

(* I tend to be like George Washington: "Be courteous to all, but intimate with few, and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence. True friendship is a plant of slow growth, and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation." I am slow to actually designate someone as a "friend," I tend to be cautious like that. Probably because I was "burned" a few times as a more enthusiastic youngling).

And I do honestly think my choice of overlooking potentially "problematic" things (and yes, I use that word on purpose with all the freight it carries now) has served me well; I am generally happier for not finding too many things to criticize about my "mates," whether they be co-workers or fellow congregants or friends. 

And I do need, these days, to work a bit harder on doing the circumstantial version of that: not looking at where I am in my life now and going, "Oh, there are so many things that could be different, there are so many things I personally haven't done that I should" or "Things aren't as good as they could be, everything is going down the tubes, woe is me" and I've done that too much of late.

Because really: I do have a job. It may not pay as well this summer as I'd have liked. I may still be asked to accept a pay cut** (a budget has been approved - finally - but no details have been released). But I'm better off than many Americans, and better off than, I dare say, the VAST majority of people on this Earth.

(**If that is the case, please, can it just be a straight, uncomplicated "we will be paying you $X less for the same amount of work" instead of the polite but unnerving fiction of taking "furlough days"? Furlough days make me sadder than a simple pay cut would. A pay cut I can adapt to and then forget happened; furlough days take continued planning and are a reminder of the difficult financial times)

I'm also good at doing this with entertainment and I admit it does make me a little sad to see someone slagging on something (a movie, a book, whatever) that I liked because it doesn't conform exactly to either their view of the world or their standards for moral rectitude. In some cases I do feel like it's people trying to look smarter-than-the-room by pointing out all the little trespasses that a movie makes, but it can decrease my enjoyment of the entertainment slightly. And I don't know, maybe that's some people's goal: THIS THING ISN'T AS CORRECT AS IT COULD BE SO YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO LIKE IT, something like that. (And this is also why I never venture too deeply into any fandom. I just like to ENJOY stuff without going to great lengths to find ways it's not perfect.)

No, I'm not a Professor Pangloss here, but I do tend to feel like there are enough things to be sad about in life without adding on the fact that, I don't know, the color used for Fluttershy's dad's hair was weird and wrong for a male Pony or whatever. (Then again, maybe expending your anger/sadness on trivial things uses it up and blunts you to feeling it over genuine wrongs in the world? I don't know).


But yeah. Just another time when I stepped out a little trusting, and got winked back at and told, "Yeah, you were right to trust. You are always right to trust."

Be courteous to all, but intimate with few, and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence.
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/g/george_washington.html