It’s A Miracle

For anyone who has noticed my absence, I’m sure it seems a miracle that I found my way back. But that isn’t the miracle I speak of. While I might have had something more substantial in the miracle department to share, had I stuck to the 40 day miracle program, I did not. I stopped around day 10. But my miracle is big for me. I just don’t want to get your hopes up, about being impressed, because I know you’ll be disappointed.

I was at the grocery store checking out and the clerk was ringing up the strawberries I was buying. He pointed to one of them and said what I thought was how good that one looked. I’m terrible at small talk so I babbled on about agreeing with him, and what a good buy they were, and he just kept looking at me like I had lost my mind. So I shut up. When I got home and unpacked them I took a better look and saw there was one strawberry in the bunch that was bad and realized he must have been pointing out the bad one, which explained why he thought I lost my mind when I went on about how good it looked.

So my point, my miracle, is how I automatically saw only the good. Normally, one bad thing and I’d be all over it. It felt so good to be able to see that my mind is finally starting to change and focus on the positive. When I first started trying to change the way I saw the world, it was a lot of work. I was constantly seeing the negative and forcing my mind to let it go and focus on something good about a situation. For a while, I literally didn’t think it was going to happen. I thought the people who talk about saying things that aren’t true because your  mind will believe the lie and it will eventually become true weren’t right about my mind. This is one thing I was so happy to be wrong about. I’m sure to some it will seem like a small, stupid miracle. But I think it’s a sign of good things to come.

Welcome Back Ulcer

For the last two weeks my boss has been on vacation. I was pleasantly surprised when he took my ulcer with him. Friday he came back, and you guessed it, so did my ulcer. Now I’m aware my ulcer wasn’t actually healed during this time, but it is safe to say the stress that irritates it is directly linked to my boss.

There were several factors that contributed to my stress on his first day back:

1) I want to take some vacation time and had to put my request in to him. This might not seem like a big deal, except it has been in the past with my boss. Details of my vacation conflict can be found here: Vacation SmackDown!

2) Things tend to break when my boss is around and apparently when he’s coming back. The microwave got wind of his return and had a major malfunction. And like our previous office equipment strikes, tale told in All The Breaks, it just needed to be unplugged. Consequently reminding me of my need to take a vacation.

3) We resumed some of the fun games we play in our office. The ever popular “guess who I’m talking to” always keeps me on my toes. Please check out: Ain’t Got The Look if you need a game refresher. Also pulled out was the recently discovered “do you know the answer.” For a review of that one, please check out: A Second Opinion.

Somehow I made it through the day, but found my technique of reminding myself there were worse situations (outlined in Six Degrees of Worse), wasn’t effective. Apparently my ulcer isn’t fooled into thinking this makes my situation any less stressful. It only recognizes: Yes, you could be the one he’s yelling at and threatening to fire. Yes, that would suck even more, but less suckage does not equal less stress, ergo less ulcer.