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
1 comment:
Awesome post, Kristen!
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