Reprimand-o-phobia

courtesy of my blog: http://cjferrara.blogspot.com/

Those of you who know my chequered past know that I have an unfortunate history of getting fired. Truth be told, I actually have only been FIRED 4 times in my life, but I have a long list of jobs that I have left for one reason or another.

During that time, the time of the firing, that is, I developed a phobia, an irrational fear of interoffice envelopes. Interoffice envelopes are usually the method of sending me the notice that I will not be back next year, or the notice that I have a meeting scheduled with a principal, and I should bring a Union rep. So, for years, I would have little baby panic attacks every time a manilla folder was in my mailbox. In the "paperless" digital age, I have transfered that fear to e-mails. I dread the words, "Please see me at your convenience," because it usually means something not good.

This week is my annual Drama club show. My district has an annoying habit of butting in during tech week. "Are you ready?" "Did you get the tickets?" "How about the programs?" This past production these annoyances included for the first time, "I'm very disappointed in the mess your students left on the stage, you may not build or paint here again." Just when I thought I got over my Reprimand-o-phobia, it's come back.

All week, I check my school e-mail and I say a little prayer, "Lord, please let there not be any stress in my mailbox today." Thank God, there hasn't been any. But still, every minute of every day, I dread the impending doom. I practice my defense, as I'm often prone to do, just in case. It adds stress to my day that I don't need. I know it's wrong, but it's a hard habit to break.

This gets me thinking about one of the practices in my favorite book, and my second bible, (other than the actual bible) "The Art of Possibility" by Benjamin and Rosamunde Zander. Later in the book, the practice  they reccomend is to see the world as it actually is, not as how you think it might be. As I put it to my daughter, "You're not allowed to worry about things until they ACTUALLY happen."

Consider this. My good friends, lets call them Gary and Dana, have a tendency to not return phone calls. Nothing good or bad about it, it's just they way they are. So we call them and leave a message asking if they want to do something this weekend. And we wait. They don't get back to us until just before Friday. In the meantime, we speculate.

Why haven't they called us back? Don't they want to talk to us? If we refused to call someone back, it would be because we hate them or are angry with them. Are they angry with us? Why would they be angry with us? Is it because we called them noodniks the other day? We were joking! They can't take a joke? What's the matter with them. We knew they were joking when they said they were going to key our car. What if they weren't joking, and they ARE going to key our car? Those noodniks! What the hell, man? I'm not speaking to them again if they're going to do that.

Simple concern turns to outright anger. But here's the thing. ALL of that previous paragraph was inside OUR heads. All that actually happened was that they didn't call us back right away. Therefore, there was really no need to get angry. Had we just practiced that rule of "Don't worry until absolutely necessary," There would have been a week of looking forward to Gary and Dana's phone call, rather than a week of hating their guts and being on the lookout for our car getting keyed.

I need to re-read that book, and start again on the path to chillaxing! I'm actually in the midst of writing a collection of songs, one for each practice in the book. Similar to what Sixx A.M. did for Nikki Sixx's book, the Heroin Diaries, except for Art of Possibility. What I hope is that the songs will remind me of the practices and help talk me down from the downward spiral I tend to go into when I see an inter-office envelope.