Another spin around the sun

I had another post written for today, nearly finished, when I returned a call I'd missed on my cel phone. Somehow, even though it was on, clipped to my right hip (as usual) and not on silent, I'd missed a call.

I discovered that a friend has gotten engaged, and as I expressed my congratulations to him, I looked at the sun outside and thought about drama. Life IS drama. Comedy and tragedy, joy and pain, laughter and tears, birth and death, weddings and funerals.

Back in my school days, I had a buddy who referred to our group of friends as 'the eternal soap opera' which, he said, was titled As The Stomach Churns. In my early working days, once out of high school, I often lamented the fact that there was so much drama in my workplaces, which included restaurants, bars, and retail stores. I often was the youngest person working wherever it was, and felt as if I was the most mature person there. Drama frustrated me, and the politics of working made me nuts.

But wherever there is humanity, there is drama. It is an inherent part of our make-up. I still have relatively little patience with it. Having been off and not working for nearly three months, I'd say that is tops on my list of things I've enjoyed about being unemployed. No work drama.

I'm about to apply for a new job, one that will thrust me most firmly back into the rising tides of politics and craziness, and I'm so excited about it. This isn't a reversal of my opinion about workplace craziness, just a change of the status quo that I'm happy about.

I understand better now than I did at 19 why we're constantly in a state of dramatic anticipation; as the years go by and we travel another lap around the sun on this little blue planet of ours, we accumulate friends and new family members, drama rises and falls like the stock market and the tides. To have no drama at all in your life is to not be living.