Missed Calling, Rebellion Aforethought, Poetry Spit-Shine

I briefly mentioned in last week’s post that I had started playing “House Flipper” and that I found it relaxing. In the interim,“House Flipper” has gone from a pleasant time-passer to a near-obsession. Long ago when I was but a naive twenty-something, I thought that I wanted to be an interior designer. Then I found out that it requires spacial awareness, math skills, and an inordinate amount of decision-making involving granite, and I lost interest. But I’ve always had a strong interest in design and I used to watch those home-decorating shows on cable with rapt attention. I am enjoying the heck out of the design aspect of this game. I love going into an empty house, coming up with a design and color theme in my head, and watching it come to fruition. If I do say so myself, I have created some beautiful spaces in-game, even if they are of no consquence in the real world. Now l am wondering in all seriousness if I truly have missed my calling and should have gone into interior design after all. I suppose it’s not too late, but I’d probably just smack up against the same spacial and math barriers as I did before. And it’s much more enjoyable to sit at my desk and create pixelated designs than have to actually go take classes and learn how to do this stuff for real.

I was given a directive from on high last week which, deliberately and with rebellion aforethought, I declined to follow. I had a litany of reasons why, but it mainly boiled down to the principle of “enough is enough.” I made a good friend of one of our building engineers when I confessed my insubordination to him on our way to a morning meeting. He was greatly impressed, and he looks at me with a new respect in his eyes now. I can tell he had me pegged as a goody-two-shoes rules-follower and an obedient drone. Which led me to ponder once again the question of whether or not I am actually a rules-follower. Although I generally do follow rules, I don’t think that I am in my heart of hearts a rule-follower. I am a workplace peacenik (the strike was extremely hard on me emotionally for all the rancor and ill-will it caused), so I will follow rules in the service of group harmony, but I’m generally rules-suspicious and am not above finding ways around the ones that I find senseless, or that cause me unreasonable inconvenience. However, although my act of defiance didn’t impact anyone negatively, or at all, I still felt wierdly guilty about it for a good portion of last week. So who knows. Maybe I am a rules-follower after all.

Speaking of rules, I recently received in my inbox the rules for the Annual Spirit First Meditation Poetry Contest, which has spurred me to put aside House Flipper for the time being to work on my new poetry series and get some poems polished and shined for contest entry. I will be writing about meditation in a very different way than I have before. We’ll see how it all pans out, or if it even will. I feel oddly insecure about the viability of this new venture and I’m not sure how any of it will go over. I just keep telling myself that the worst that will happen is that I will have written a bunch of poems that no one likes and everyone will think I’m weird, which is hardly the end of the world. 

 

In celebration of all of you secret rebels out there, enjoy this video by Dorothy.

--Kristen McHenry