Silliest worry of the day

I was walking home from the beach with Blue this morning when I bumped into a woman who lives on my street. She was pushing her infant daughter in the stroller and I stopped to chat and admire the adorable baby. Since this neighbour of mine had her baby we have enjoyed a lovely "meeting in the street" relationship. However, prior to the birth, my neighbour had rarely even smiled at me from a distance. Of course, this fact could have been understood in any number of different ways, but this was the reason I came up with (more than two year ago!):

This woman had an old car which she parked on the street and never used. After a few months the rego expired and someone must have reported it to the Council/police because it soon had a sticker on it asking the owner to either remove the car or have it registered. The next day, the woman put a huge handwritten note on the car saying "To the neighbour who finds my car so offensive, get stuffed" (well...that was the general idea). I had decided that she probably thought that I was that person who had alerted the authorities, and even though I wasn't, I still felt incredibly bad every time she didn't smile at me.

Back to this morning. Even though we now have a lovely neighbourly relationship, as I walked away I still worried that she still thought it had been me who had called in her car. Which is clearly INSANE. But you were all so beautifully warm and generous and understanding in your commentboxes for my last post, so I just know that you will UNDERSTAND the insanity.

That felt very cleansing I must say.

No worries mate

Several years ago I worked in a residential college at one of the local universities. I managed the 32 students who lived in the building, looking after the daily running of the housekeeping, kitchen etc, and I also booked the rooms out during the semester breaks, a bit like running a b&b, only for academic visitors. One phrase which I found myself using often, much to the amusement of the foreign visitors was "no worries." You want to extend your stay? The phone isn't working? Extra towels? You're vegetarian? No worries!

The truth was that I worried ALL of the time. I worried that I had double-booked a room, that I misfiled applications, that I gave wrong change, that I was working too slowly. I tend to worry all the time about everything. Most of my worries....OK...all of my worries...are usually about imaginary things that only exist IN MY MIND. The real stuff that happens to me that's not so good, well...I just take action and deal with it as best I can. But the imaginary future is my downfall.

So now I have decided to list the ridiculous things I have worried about today. It's a type of blogging-as-therapy if you will:

That the librarians at the Film School (who I see almost every day, and for whom I baked alphabet cookies for Christmas) are irritated by me. I like to chat with the assistant (if you remember, the one who is intellectually challenged) and one time last December I didn't realise that he wasn't on a scheduled break and I heard him being told that, and I felt guilty and now I think the librarians think I'm a distraction to him, and that may lead to him losing his job and it would all be my fault.

That I'll be the odd one out in my screenwriting class and all of the other students will be really chummy and will go out to dinner together and have fun and I will end up crying in the toilets like I did in Year 6 when I didn't have anybody to hang out with at recess and lunchtime.

That I didn't walk Blue for long enough this morning, and my jogging husband is away, so Blue will pick up bad habits because Cesar Milan says dogs need exercise first and affection later, but I cuddled him a lot and gave him little exercise.

That I may have been too strident in voicing my views in a commentbox of a blogger who was discussing the moral implications of Bella's lack of premarital sex in "Twilight". She thought premarital sex was a good and healthy and beautiful thing and should be described in young adult fiction. Then I worried that I gave the wrong impression in that commentbox, I'm really ambivalent about the premarital sex issue, I really wanted to say that I don't like criticism of stories on moral grounds, stories are entertainment. I'm going to stop now and go on to the next worry. Sorry.

That I am spending too much time worrying instead of actually doing stuff, such as looking after the house, the family and my future-as- yet-to-be-discovered-money-making-career. That's right, I worry about worrying too much.

I bet you can't wait to read tomorrow's list.