dodging bullets: a fun thing to do/say when your life doesn't consist of dodging real bullets.

If I can package the events and realizations going on in my life into an idiom or generally old-timey sounding saying, I'm going to do it. For better or worse, this is how it is. And boy have I been dodging bullets today. All week, even. Because you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. Catch my drift?

I will break it down into non-nonsense terms. This has been a heavy-hitting bad news kind of week. No one is dead and no one is very ill, but the tides are turning kinda suckily for some of the people I love most, and like...me, a little bit. Laying-off of loved ones has taken place. Rejections have been doled out. Boner moves have been made by many, including me and the folks at GoogleMaps and the CTA Trip Planner.

I usually hate using the quaint phrase "everything happens for a reason." I'm all for finding a quarter in your jeans or happening upon a Whole Foods grand opening, but so much random shit is just bad. I don't want it holding high influence over the rest of my day, let alone life. I don't like letting things be, I don't like chalking one up to chance or "how it is." I need to know things. I need to make rain, and I would like the universe's aid in that enterprise.

Long story short, the random bad shit that is just happening...maybe there's reason to be yanked from it, forced free and trotted out like a show pony before being ridden into the Forests of Growth And Change. Losing out could provide an opportunity to not lose out again, or win something greater: understanding, a better job, organic produce...

Maybe sometimes all it takes is a pretty sucky run of it to recharge the waters before dumping them all over your opponents...In this case, the unseen forces that guide bad things towards good people, loss to those who deserve to keep what they have earned, and computer problems to those who need to print lesson plans to finally win gainful employment over.

I don't think everything happens for a reason. But there's a reason the saying doesn't go "when life gives you lemons, just look at the lemons for a while in disgust."