Memory Lapse

By about 3 o'clock this afternoon, I was ready to remove the saddle I had only yesterday decided to climb enthusiastically back into and use it to beat the ever-lovin' shit out of the very next person who looked at me funny.

I just don't know why I let myself unravel so thoroughly so frequently these days. Other than the usual timeworn hormonal reasons, it seems like I choose to be pissed off about things that really don't matter in the grand scheme of things far more than I'm ready to admit.

Take this morning, for instance. My weekday driver Muthii, a kindly older Kikuyu gent who just about jumps through hoops to be available whenever I need him, was 15 minutes late instead of his usual 90 minutes early. That's one of the things that was truly working my nerves before I left for the States. Muthii is so eager and grateful for the work that he tries to anticipate when I'll need him long before I actually do. Which if he was my own personal driver would be just fine, but he's just this really nice taxi driver I try to throw some work to whenever I can. I do NOT want to be made to feel responsible for feeding and educating his entire village with every travel decision I make.

Then when I got to the office, it was a non-stop blizzard of emails, phone calls, conversations, and negotiations to try and get a few reporting projects underway. Everything is STILL such a challenge, from making a basic phone call to finding a reporter who's interested in pursuing stories I think they should be covering. Trust me, you can get awfully tired of feeling like an Imperialist Running Dog trying to force her journalistic vision down "the natives" throats every day.

So by the end of a long hard slog of a day, all I wanted to do was get home, pull on some jammies and some warm fuzzy socks, and simmer in my own gastric juices. This time Muthii was 15 minutes late again, and it was cold and wet and rainy, and as I stood there watching the growing, disorganized, completely random streams of traffic that signalled a long, congested, and doubly hazardous drive back out to the leafy suburbs, I couldn't help whipping out my BlackBerry Bold to post a mobile Facebook status update suggesting that were either of my long-departed grandmothers still living, I would cheerfully strangle them till their eyeballs popped out of their withered old heads.

By the time I got home, fended off a few lascivious Skype calls and logged onto Facebook from my laptop, I was well-primed to post an even more snarky, ill-tempered status update. But then I got a good look at my profile picture, which I'd just changed on Sunday....or "Godmother's Day," as my dear friend Joyce reminded me.

It's a picture of me and my thoroughly cherished godson Ty, and his insanely adorable little sister Talia. When I visited them in North Carolina a few weeks ago, I was determined to get a pleasant, smiling picture of me with Ty, after 8 years of hellish resistance on his part. When Ty was little, he just flat-out refused to sit still next to me long enough for a decent shot. Then, as he grew older, he insisted on making rude faces or grimacing, no matter how much I begged or pleaded, or how much his parents threatened to punish him.

This time it really seemed like Ty was going to be a sweet, compliant little boy and sit quietly bearing an angelic smile. But just before the flash, the little imp gave a big thumbs up, while Talia completely lost it over a silly face her Daddy was making.

So instead of the pleasant "formal" portrait I'd been hoping for, I got this fabulous shot of me with two kooky, belly-laughing kids to remind me that Life is too damn short and too damn uncontrollably fucked to walk around pissed off through most of it. I must try and remember this exact moment a lot more often these days.