Truthfully, I want to be an honorable person, I do. I want to do right by my family, my friends, my community. I want to pay bills on time, carry no credit card debt, turn in forms and papers ahead of schedule.
But intent matters not at all in life. It’s all about result.
During the last 24 hours I found that only the debt-free credit card remains on my list of virtues. I’ll give just one example of my fall from grace. The others are too embarrassing to blog about. But this one is typical of the whole lot of them:
Yesterday, a friend was giving me a lift to the gym (noble! I went to the gym!). I asked that he drive by a mailbox so I could dump there a whole stack of bills, timely paid, a week in advance. I get out, kiss the envelopes farewell and throw them down the blue monster mouth of the corner mailbox. Back in the car I hear my friend say “sure is a pain with the postal rate change going into effect today.”
Postal rate change going into effect today? Today?
[Q posited to the USPS: what will happen to all my bills, sent with 37 cent stamps? Answer given in that bored voice you reserve for people you hate: we will notify the recipient that they can pay the missing two cents. Otherwise, if they refuse, we will keep it at the Post Office for ten days, then return it to sender. Oh come on! MG&E, SBC, Charter Com, Verizon, etc. – are they at all going to sign over two pennies for the pleasure of receiving my bills?! Thanks, USPS. Even car rental agencies and credit card companies give grace periods.]
Leading a barely-one-step-ahead-of-the-law, devil-may-care kind of life was much easier. I was pretty good at that. This virtuous stuff sucks the life out of me, really it does.
(I took the picture below because it just was so in my face with its ugliness: bare gnarled branches, not a speck of green, not a flake of snow. Weird month. Really weird.)
I don't think the photo is ugly, either. I think it's fractal-icious. (hee)
ReplyDeleteI know with most people (and nearly all business), results are what counts. But here on Ocean, I think intentions count for a lot, if only because they give us something to reflect on when we realize how consistently they diverge from reality. (Well, at least my intentions diverge from reality...)
I think that photo is lovely. And I also know now you know what I mean about living a life of small sins, one after another. Good luck with them putting your .02 in for you!
ReplyDeleteI didn't know about the postal rate change either. Maybe I need to pull my head down out of the clouds and try harder to stay on top of what is happening in the real world.
ReplyDeleteOnline bill pay is a good tool to use on the path toward nobility. I haven't used stamps in ... as long as I can remember. However, overdependence on it (or, rather, mis-use of it) almost caused A-- and me to have to get married recently! Yikes!!
ReplyDeleteall: you know, those trees looked so menacing yesterday. and so okay today.
ReplyDeleteasia: yeah, and they mount, don't they...
tonya and majorsteele: somehow I would have messed up even with online payments. I was in that kind of mess-up mode. And I don't know why the timing of this hike escaped me. I can speculate, but that's just too depressing.