November 12, 2006

• Where Pride Goeth

  Over the last three weeks, I've had several conversations with friends concerned about a certain attitude I wear like my favorite garment.  There are sometimes a few threadbare places where the elements slip through, but altogether, it keeps me warm and cozy like a favorite garment should. 

  I have an attitude of pride.  I don't want to be helped, thank you.  I want figure it out, work it through, climb the mountain, and just do it on my own. 

  The understanding of where this attitude comes from isn't difficult.  For a long time, I had such a sense of incompetence that once I discovered I could do anything, I wanted to do everything.  Apparently, this attitude has been noticed because people who don't even talk to each other came together like some intervention group to confront me about the problem my attitude was causing.

  And I thought I was ready to be a little softer and admit to a little more need.  But I was not prepared for the magnitude of helplessness that I found myself in on Wednesday.  The blessing and the curse of being primarily a cashless culture is that a person doesn't have to have physical paper cash for cash flow.  But if the electronic flow is disrupted, it doesn't matter how much paper cash you have in hand. 

  So in ways that I never expected even after the recent softening up, I've had to ask for and receive assistance from my friends and family.  On Wednesday evening, I was crying, overwhelmed and bewildered by the problem, trying to figure out how I was going to cope and not seeing anyway that anyone else could help me.

  Mary set me straight with a great line, "I'm a smarter rat than that."

   

  Recovering

  It's hard to calculate the magnitude of loss that comes when someone has stolen from you.  Even the monetary things are difficult to add up, because there's always another little something you didn't think of until you need it, months down the road from where you are.

  The worst may be the intangibles, loss of trust, loss of innocence, and loss of compassion.    (I do still and sincerely wish to cause pain to the person who did this.) 

  Several very smart rats pointed out that the football tickets might be the key to finding the thief.  So I called and dealt with the Colorado Springs Police, and the Air Force Academy MP's who agreed to follow up on that.  I don't know what happened at the Air Force vs Notre Dame game yesterday (excepting that ND totally dominated the field).  The policeman who went to investigate the seats didn't call me back. 

  I am recovering.  I have had help already and offers of more help that I hoped not to need, but may.  I opened a new checking account on Thursday that I thought I was supposed to be able to access, but as of yesterday, I couldn't set up any bill pays from it and the 1-800 customer service line couldn't help me. Apparently, that account is frozen too.  So I'll be back there tomorrow trying to figure that out.

  The greatest loss of course was the amount of writing on the flashdrive that was stolen.  But yesterday I determined to simply write, write, write, until I had written those scenes and so far past them that I didn't care anymore about that loss.  And I did it.  It took me three days to rewrite up to the point I had reached on Wednesday morning - 13,700 words.  Yesterday I wrote an additional 5,380 words (three chapters) and my total now stands at 19,080.  I am back in the game. 

  (Mary said that would be more inspiring if I'd had to start over completely from 0 but the truth is that between a couple scenes that I'd emailed and a file saved on my laptop, I had over 8,000 words that I was able to recover as my starting point on Thursday.  Still that makes my three day total just under 11,000 words and I'm not willing to shoot for much more inspiration than that.)

  And speaking of being in the game, my beloved (this year) Arkansas Hawgs won again last night.  31-14 over the Tennessee Volunteers.  We are a huge step closer to the Sugar Bowl!  And I'm a happy happy football fan.

  

  • 7:29 am
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