Ode to Melissa Etheridge

My office hours don't start until 10 am. Combine this fact with a closed office door and a newly installed reflective coating on the windows and you've got the basics of a recipe for blog time. It is a blog time complete with Melissa Etheridge, though I obviously can't have her belting it out as loudly as I would like. There must be at least a few fellow faculty members that don't appreciate her hard core, rockin' awesomeness as much as I do. Not all of us can have as good of taste in music as I do.

"I WANT A COME OVER!!! TO HELL WITH THE CONSEQUENCE!!"

Ah, yes, this will be a good morning.

If you know me, you know that I have "happy songs". These songs are not always the same. As a sophomore in high school, I got moving in the morning by blaring Queen and bouncing down the hallway singing Bicycle and Fat Bottomed Girls at the top of my lungs. Meredith Brooks' Bitch was another number that helped me cope with tough times. There have been many a P!nk song to make it onto the "happy song" list.

As you might have noticed, there is a trend of strong female vocalists on this list. Freddie Mercury... well its not really that much of a stretch, now is it? Besides, I'm of the opinion that classic rock doesn't get more classic than Freddie Mercury. Disagree if you will, but you would almost need to have lived under a rock for the last few decades to not know Bohemian Rhapsody, regardless of your typical musical genre preference.

Its a time for "happy music". Its a time for forgiving myself for struggling, picking myself back up, blasting Melissa Etheridge, and continuing to fight the good fight. But man, has it been a week.

Yesterday I was walking to the Community College campus once again pondering explaining recent events of my life to my students. I always come to the same conclusion, however: its none of their business, and I don't need to make excuses for not having their quizzes graded the very next day or not having a lecture turn out very well. These things would happen regardless. While I was pondering this, however, I found that I described myself as "a wreck" and I found myself realizing that in one way or another I am always "a wreck". The longer I considered this, the more I realized that we're all a bunch of "wrecks". How can we not be?

We have so little control over everything in our lives because we are surrounding by free thinking individuals, and a world of uncertainty. Of course I'm "a wreck". Like everyone else, I wake up every morning unsure of what the day will bring me and always faced with the possibility that it will go to pot in a matter of moments. What separates me is what I do with this fact. Do I curl up in a ball and refuse to face it? Do I become angry and over-bearing as a way of shutting out so much of the world that I am almost guaranteed more control? Do I fall into a constant state of complaint to compensate for adversity with attention?

Or do I just accept that today I will do the best I can to take it all in stride and make the most of every opportunity. Even those moments that feel disastrous are filled with opportunities.

This isn't to say that I'm not still struggling. Its simply to say that there's a reason to get up every morning, and a reason to cut myself some slack when its tough to.

"COME TO MY WINDOW!! COME INSIDE, WAIT BY THE LIGHT OF THE MOON!!"