Hey you guys,
Have you ever pushed a button for an elevator or started the bar-b-que and then stepped away thinking that something was in progress? Yeah, me neither. I’m a watcher. I watch for signs of progress.
If you have profound trust issues like I do, then you push the button to call the elevator like a junkie with a self-administered morphine drip. I know that the more I push it—the faster it will come.
Can I get an AMEN?!
But have you ever been distracted enough by let’s say Snapchat, or a CNN news alert about the latest asinine Trump tweet, that you missed the fact that you pushed—and nothing happened?
That’s the feeling I’ve been having lately. Like I pushed the Easy button and looked down at my phone for a minute and everything got hard. Harder. Hardest.
So what does this self-confessed lover of all things easy do in a situation such as this?
Well, I push harder. Duh! Don’t you?
My neurosis looks like this: I make a phone call to clear up some bureaucratic snafu and it goes straight to voicemail (which you have to admit is SO un-gratifying!) so what should I do? I think the answer is clear: I wait an appropriate amount of time for a reply (one hour) and then I call back obsessively and leave another seventy-hundred messages that start off nice and polite—and slowly devolve into a monologue that sounds like it’s taken from the pages of an old Andrew Dice Clay stand-up act circa 1980.
I push harder.
I sent important emails last week and haven’t received any responses. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Do dah.
Well, that’s just bad manners Fancy East Coast Magazine. At least send a confirmation that you received my submission and let me live in peace. Instead, I’m two whiskey sours away from risking looking like the insecure, over-zealous, micro-managing, control-freak that I am by re-sending it when you’ve specifically asked writers not to. You obviously know my type and want to save yourselves from four million re-submissions of the same essay.
They say on the submissions page, “We’ll get back to you in 90 days.”
Sadists.
That just makes me want to push harder. I could be dead in 90 days, killed by a horde of marauding middle-aged midgets who’ve been sent by my husband to put me out of my misery.
I suppose this will be a good lesson in “trusting the fucking process” (I added the fucking for emphasis. Pushing it?). But ninety days is an eternity when you’re waiting!
I have five articles out in the world right now with various publications, waiting for the green light.
I continue to push the Easy Button. Hard. And often.
I’m fifty-nine. When does this striving thing go away? Sixty? Seventy? Never?
Oh…wait…I forgot to say please.
And abracadabra.
I forgot to use magic! Shit. (Forehead slap) I do that all the time!
Sorry, gotta go.
Carry on,
xox
