Adaptability

Philosophers, physicists, and intellectual pundits throughout history have long pondered a Unified Theory of Everything. If they would put down the particle accelerator and show up at Café Tor I would tell them what they wanted to know:

The cosmic love-honey that holds everything together is adaptability!

I mention this now because I had this one idea for a post all mapped out, and then Things Happened yesterday, and now I'm not in the mood. So the Muse will have to wait and sip her chai latte, because I will not be a slave to a List of Things to Write About ( I don't think she cares; she's found an old copy of People Magazine and is tapping her foot to Dizzy Gillespie).

This is an example of Adaptability in Action:

MP left for another gig yesterday. He does that all the time; it's nothing new, but this time he wanted to take my car because he had other people and things to take with him. So I clean out my CDs, fluff my car, and he takes off with it (leaving me with his car, a quarter of a tank of gas and a tire pressure of 15 psi. MP is going to have a real swell homecoming, I promise)

Five minutes later, I get a call on my cell. In the seconds it takes to actually answer the call, I have a terrifying vision of MP stranded by the side of the road in the bitter cold. "Tut-tut, Marianne!" I say to myself, "You worry too much."

It's MP. "I'm stranded by the side of the road in the bitter cold. Your car won't start."

Before I answered the phone, I was worried about him. After I answered the phone and it was confirmed that he was in fact stranded by the side of the road in the bitter cold, I was not worried at all. It was more like, "It's been five minutes -- How did you screw up my car in five minutes?"

MP managed to leave the car in a decent spot where it wouldn't cause trouble and got a ride with someone else. I stopped by later and, sure enough, the car wouldn't start. It's being towed somewhere by someone who can hopefully do something to fix it. Meanwhile, I have MP's crappy car, so I'm not stranded. It could have been a lot worse -- no one was greatly inconvenienced, the tow truck only has to go a mile to get to the garage, and no body parts were frozen.

Adaptability.

(If this had been my sister, she would have been stranded in Fairbanks with the baby crying, no cell, and not a dime in her pocket. She would have last eaten four grapes seven hours previously and a pack of tundra wolves would be closing in. That, in a nutshell, is the difference between my sister and me.)

This entire gig of MP's has been one long exercise in adaptability, so I imagine he's rolling with it and is doing fine. As for myself, I can't wait to find out what happened to the car. I'm also mildly interested to know when I'll get back into the mood to complete the post I had originally planned... But the Muse appears to have begun a chess game with her sometimes-lover, Procrastination, so it may be a while.