"Argue for your limitations and sure enough they're yours."
Author, Richard Bach
Your action for today is to question one of the limitations you think you have.My Send Out Cards mentor's daily challenge nails it. The Pecker In Chief, the Top Cock, the Rooster (X_____________________) on your paycheck is all about why he hasn't gotten it done.
When I got my ass kicked out of Syndicated News Features Sales, (by a selection of colleagues incapable of valuing me - hey, wasn't that hatchet job done enough by my Ex Husband?) I sought consolation among other unemployed professionals in Atlanta who were victims of Jimmy Carter's Economy and Ronald Reagan's beatification. (He wasn't yet cannonized, but declared "Blessed and on the path to Sainthood" by Les Miserables.) We had a colleague in the skate rental business near Piedmont Park whose counterpart was better situated and winning the Michiganders' Competition. The idea was to offer free skate rentals to night skaters of the streets who would meet in the Sears Parking Lot in Buckhead after the store had closed, lace on their reserved rentals delivered personally by the proprietor, and go for a social skate/Buckhead Bar Roll in the neighborhoods of West Paces Ferry. They tuned up with a buzz around the lot before embarking, and until the headphones went on, would engage in chat with the regulars and newly attracted skaters. It was all blow'n b.s. and we all tried to build up our egos with accents on the positives of why we were here. Despite falls from grace from once nice jobs, we were resilient and pulling ourselves up, literally, by our skateboots.
By and by, as Deborah Norville, my sister Claire and I eventually discovered, those who held onto their jobs were knifing each other, clients and stockholders in the back with cocaine and other drug-induced political will, and we who were economically ditched, learned we didn't lose our job; we were ejected from the magnetism of Le Cage Aux Folles and rescued, by our "misfortune," hence preserving our ability to pass a mandatory drug test once employers got wise.
Each of us so delighted in the awesome experience of "skating the skreets" in night lights and traffic with our rapidly evolving headsets jamming rock that we invited everyone we knew to come out and skate with us on Wednesdays. We formed a club, established a philanthropy and found new identities as a flock of flying friends. We got noticed, we got honks of all natures and we got to feeling better and better about ourselves as we grew increasingly more fit and flashy with our tricks.
So, as new inductees joined us on our Friday Night Downtown Skill Skates, intent on impressing us with their no-longer-validating achievements in the corporate realm, we would just adjust our headphones on our ears, pause before we cranked the volume on the latest 'Brothers In Arms' and simply dismissed the notion of living in the past with one question of our own:
Are you here to talk or skate?
1 comment:
watchin' the replay of last night's Pirates game and cracking up at Bob Walk. He's got the Woo thing carrying throughout the play-by-play and, as a foul tip off just-nearly-beaned McCutchen's bat nails home plate umpire, Mark Wagner's right shoulder, he says: "Awe, hit him in the right arm too. I HATED that when I was pitching. I hated to see an umpire take a shot on a right shoulder like that when I was on the mound. You know why, don't you?
"Why?" plays Tim Neverett.
Well, because they don't want to put their right arm up now to call strikes. It's sore. Much easier to just call balls.
Post a Comment