Hath Struck Out

[No joy in Mudville today. You don't even want to see the lengthy list I compiled in my head last night after I collapsed into bed: if I were a betting man, I might look at those liabilities and go with a different horse.]

[The second worst part about not passing the Bar exam has been telling people, over and over again. I sent a group text message over la cellulaire, so that took care of a lot, but I was in the middle of a shift at the FNC when I found out, so all my (caring, devoted!) friends with whom I work all got to hear me say it. By the time I was done, and Leah mercifully let me check out early, I was in no shape to accept Buddy-Boy's kind invitation to go see a new Spike and Mike festival in the Mission. I crawled into bed, instead, felt the weight of the entire last year fall upon me at once, bawled, then slept.]

[Spike and Mike. Geez, that was so college. As was "Ben," the long-ago ex about whom I've been having weird vibes for the last couple of months. Last week, I found out that my ex-boss and friend (I believe I pseudonymized her as "Beth" when transcribing the original Santa Barbara Diaries) died unexpectedly during emergency surgery. She and a group of us from that agency were buddies for a good while in the mid-'90s, and I had introduced Ben to Beth.]

[After I left S.B., Beth and Ben stayed friends, growing closer thru the years. When she died, Ben asked another friend from that era to call me, he did, and gave me Ben's number. I left him a voice message a couple of days ago, and last night, there was a voice message from him among the others condoling me about the Bar. "Great," I thought...more tears, more what-might-have-been-and-was-never-meant-to-be.]

["What a terrible mess I've made of my life." (Flush.) Yeah, yeah...it's not actually the end of the world, and my feelings will catch up to my brain one of these days. Yet, here we are now.]

Previously Next

[Later: If last night's trauma had only been about not passing the Bar, this quote (via a silly nun whom I don't read often enough) would be a little heavy...]

[In the Sufi tradition, there is a saying, "Overcome any bitterness that may have come because you were not up to the magnitude of the pain that was entrusted to you. Like the mother of the world, who carries the pain of the world in her heart, each of us is part of her heart and therefore endowed with a certain measure of cosmic pain. You are sharing in the totality of that pain. You are called upon to meet it in joy, instead of self-pity. The secret: offer your heart as a vehicle to transform cosmic suffering into joy." -Jack Kornfield]