It's All Happening

The universe has a weird sense of humor. I've never really gotten it, but then my sense of humor is quite dry and the universe tends to lean towards ironic. Dry would be better. I get dry. Irony -- while appreciated in literature, is not something I look for in my life.

I will say, despite some "humorous" happenings on the employment front, I am feeling quite energized lately. Maybe it's because I can breathe through my nose again for the first time in a month. Maybe it's because the persistant coughing that has plagued me is subsiding -- of course, the universe is having a good chuckle as my throat began to tickle at my possibly premature prediction of health. And I'll just go ahead and apologize now for the alliteration in that last sentence. I've become quite fond of it in recent weeks. Alliteration. Not apologizing.

And I should be having genuine feelings of elation these days. You see... years ago I came up with a theory. In years that ended in an odd number, the end of those years generally bit. They bit hard. Some worse than others, but in the rollarcoaster cycle of my life, the winters of my discontent always seemed to happen when the odd hit the even. Conversely, even-to-odd seasons (like this year) tend, on average, to be better. It's not written in stone or anything... but there is a pattern. So you can imagine how extremely perturbed I've been that this even-to-odd winter was shaping up to -- well -- bite. Hard.

Actually, you don't have to imagine. You've seen my blogs. Existential this and woe-is-me that. I was this close to being the "Before" part of some legal mood-altering-drug commercial. You know, the ones where the little blob won't go to the party with the happier blobs until he takes a pill and all his troubles melt away like traffic-stained slush in the Spring.

Today though -- this entire last week, in fact -- something's different. No pills and it's actually raining right now, but I'm still feeling good. So maybe this Winter... the good was just late. Like the cycle was thrown off for some reason and the downswing was unusally long in 2006. Actually, 2006 was funny. In a universal way. Just as things were going well professionally, the bottom fell out. You might remember the blog with the screaming guy by all the computers... yeah, that one.

Since then, I've been -- existing. But not really living.

And then -- BOOM -- everything just... shifted. In a good way. I feel positive about future employment opportunities. I'm not worried about not being able to purchase Christmas presents for my loved ones. Whether or not I can isn't the issue anymore. And I'm not nervous about my directing post beginning in a month (in fact, I'm stoked). And I feel like I'm making progress in my creative writing and will have some finished manuscripts to show for it by year's end. All in all, it feels like things are going to be good. Doesn't mean I actually know what's going to happen. It's funny... there are still a ton of things up in the air and I still feel like I'm jugging fireballs; but it's thrilling now for some reason -- like my next trick will be even more spectacular.