Carrots, Eggs, Coffee

No, its not a new breakfast menu.

Its kind of a rant and kind of not. You see, in the past week I have discovered I can tell the difference between a cold and allergies, and my body has transitioned seamlessly from one to the other and back again. Kudos on the great teamwork, Body. You are really doing a great job making me want to shoot myself. In the past three days I have lost my appetite, five pounds, and all desire to sleep. And starting tonight, I am itchy all over my body with no visible rash or hives to prove there's a problem. I am also trying to find a job, clean up my room and my life and my mental state of mind, and sort out how much jujitsu I actually want in my life these days. Why am I telling you this?

Because tonight, I was cleaning out my email account and came across an email from my mom. The story is that the daughter went to her mom and said, "Everything in my life is going wrong. I solve one problem and another pops up." Her mother took her into the kitchen and put three pots of water on the stove. She put carrots in one pot, eggs in another, and coffee beans in the third.

After 20 minutes of boiling, the mother turned off the stove. She fished out the carrots and put them in a bowl, the eggs into a second bowl, and ladled the coffee beans into a third bowl. She asked her daughter to feel each one and tell her what had happened. The daughter asked her mother what it meant.

"Each of these items experienced the same adversity: boiling water. The hard, unrelenting carrots were made soft and limp by the water. The egg with a liquid interior became hardened inside. But the coffee beans remained the same. It was the boiling water that changed. When things get tough, be yourself. Don't change because of circumstances, but do your best to change the circumstances rather than let them dictate who you should be."

Its an interesting concept. Sometimes I think a little change is good for me, so I don't know that this is entirely accurate. But it is a curious thing to be coffee. I am not exactly sure what I should be changing my circumstances into. If my problem is that Northern New Jersey has a limited number of jobs available, how exactly do I go about changing the circumstances and adding jobs to the market? If my problem is my body isn't healthy anymore, isn't that difficult to change? My point is some circumstances aren't changeable so this email is overly ambitious. But it is good to be coffee I think. If nothing else, when you are coffee, people will depend on you to wake them up. Plus, not everyone likes eggs. Coffee, even if you hate the taste, still smells good.