It's A Sign!

I love it when random chance leads to a revelatory insight, as it did to me today.

I've never been on good terms with Monday mornings. Of late our relationship has gone from bad to worse. I try to undermine Monday by waking late. Monday retaliates by throwing me out of bed and forcing me to go out into the world and meet stupid people.

It makes me meet people like the consular officer in the Peruvian consulate. I went there today to get a visa for a trip that I'm going to make at the end of August. But first the officer wanted a certificate from a doctor to prove that as of today I do not have the H1N1 virus inside me. It did not matter to her that I still have six weeks after today to acquire it, store it in my body, and smuggle it into her country when I go there. And she's only interested in swine flu; she does not care if I have the bugs for bird flu, typhoid, or the bubonic plague.

Yes, I tried to reason with her politely. The more fool me.

In the end I was forced to walk back to my office without a visa, ranting silently and tearing my hear out imaginarily. I was way too pissed to notice anything around me until I saw a sign that made me stop dead. "Life is short", it said. "Be quick to love and make haste to be kind."

And here I was, frittering away my precious minutes in silent fury at a problem that I could do nothing about today, but which I had plenty of time to take care of later.

So I stopped looking inside myself at my bubbling pit of frustration and instead looked around. At the lovely church that stood behind the sign that had woken me up. At a cyclist who had dismounted and was now stretched out in the sun with a newspaper. At an engraving in the pavement in front of me that recorded the past winners of the Boston Marathon and their race times. At the few tourists who were out and about and who had been taking in all these sights with wide eyes while I had been ignoring everything.

And then for the rest of the day crazy stuff happened which made no sense at all, not even by Monday's abysmal standards. I won't go into detail because I can't; and even if I did, it would be insufferably boring. Suffice to say that I have seldom seen as much corporate irrationality packed into a single day as I did today. But I kept remembering that life is short, and I got the better of Monday.

(Until later in the eveining, when I went to the gym and my trainer kicked my ass. Effing Monday got it's revenge then.)