When life gives you a lemon… (written late January/early February 2013

 

(from an alternative journal)

 

There is a strange disconnect between what her poetry says and what she says to other people.

Her poems suggest she is near despair, locked into a situation she can barely tolerate, something so far below her talents that she has to brace herself up to keep on going.

Her public pronouncements tell a different tale, as this one after a snow storm hit our neck of the woods.

“Glad to work for a town ('s mayor) who appreciates the weather conditions and lets his employees go home at 2 p.m.,” she wrote. “I haven't had a snow day since the four-foot-snow blizzard after Christmas 2010 when my restaurant shut down, and before that, not since high school!”

This may have been written with the knowledge that the Virgin Mayor – to whom she is referring – may well be reading it, or one of his henchmen, and is designed to create the impression that she is on the same team.

On the other hand, she tends to throw herself all in on new enterprises and may well be an honest expression of her enthusiasm to be given and opportunity to be a member of the team.

The conversation talks about previous efforts to get to work in any kind of weather and ended up with her joking about it.

“I know this is going to be overused like "like" in a sentence, but: I FOUND NEMO,” she wrote.

But her posts go on as if to convince herself of how good she has it now as prior to this, alluding to an optimism in public that she does not seem to have in private.

“I am grateful for my optimism despite all the (allegedly) inordinate amount of crap (I disagree; I believe that's just life) that's been (so they tell me) laid upon me in such a short space of time, because most assume I'd be a hardcore pessimist; but despite my daily struggle to believe in a world I don't feel at all a part of (but am not bitter about!), I still carry on and encourage others to do so once I'm moving well into my day. And thank *insert power here* for whatever power that grabs me hours after the morning hours that keeps me here.”

But then, in a subsequent post, she describes a typical day in her life/

“Step one: eat half of giant sandwich. Step two: pass out. Step three: wake up and eat other half of giant sandwich. Step four: cry self to sleep, shedding alternate years of guilt and satiety. I am grateful for possibility, because it turns the status quo into a heartless myth.”

She goes on to talk about what else she is grateful for.

“I am grateful to have heat today, because the local shelter requires its residents to leave the premises from 8 am to 6 pm and I can't even be in the cold for twenty minutes without weeping like an idiot,” she wrote. “I am grateful for lemonade, because it makes me happier than an unused lemon.”

 

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