random thoughts – Day 1,886 – (Friday) –a long day and a what if

Fridays usually have a vibe that I like. The traffic is generally a bit lighter, the parking garage is less full, and the mood in the office is breezy. The time often passes quickly and then boom, it’s the weekend.

Except for today.

The morning traffic featured an extra special dummy in front of me. This driver in an SUV pulled onto VFW and took a wide left as if entering the far-right lane to take the right onto Bridge Street. Instead of entering the right lane, they chose to overshoot the lane to go straight and then stop in the intersection, blocking access to the far right turn lane and screwing up the flow for me and the several people behind me. I was the a**hole blowing the horn for them to move. They didn’t move, but they lowered the window, tapped the roof of the car, and raised the window, whatever that meant.

We finally got out of the intersection and cleared the way for the drivers from another direction who had had a green light for several seconds and couldn't move. Vehicles flowed down the lane, around the corner, and over the bridge and I was able to shake it off. Kind of. I focused on the latest display of brightly colored dresses in the shop window just across the bridge.

The rest of the day dragged butt. I was hungry and thought it was time for lunch, but it was only 10:00. I made myself wait until 11:00 to eat my lunch of rice, black beans and salsa, which I spilled all over my desk with an errant hand movement.

Kitty Yoga!

I took a walk to enjoy the 80 degrees and sunshine, and made it into the Lazy Cat Lounge to check out the cat-related items. The cat room was closed for their nap time but a Tuxedo kitty let me admire it in the glass doorway. It was too late in the day for coffee, so I bought a brownie. On the way out, I noticed the board with events listed -- like Kitty Yoga!

At 3:00, a colleague and I were on Teams Message bemoaning the glacial pace of the longest Friday in the history of Fridays and work. It was brutal.

The ride home had light traffic and the annual scenes of UMass graduates posing for photos near the stone sign for North Campus. From across the intersection, I could see this year's crop of graduates rotating in and out of the annual coveted photo spot. 

I don’t remember taking photos on the Fitchburg State campus when I graduated, but I was a commuter student so there wasn’t exactly a bounty of special campus memories for me. I attended class, went to work, went home to my family, and hung around with the locals I knew in high school, so it felt exactly like being in high school. If I could do it over again, I would go away to college for the full experience of learning independence and who I was.

If there was a time machine and I could have a do-over of a single chapter of life, I would probably redo college. The only other school I had applied to was UMass Amherst, and I often wonder what my life would look like had I gone there instead. I didn’t go because I was p*ssed I didn’t get into the dance program (for reasons I never questioned), and instead of choosing another major and auditioning for the dance program again as suggested in my letter from the school, I scrapped the dream and went to Fitchburg State, my default school. I wonder what direction my life would have taken had I gone to school in Amherst with the reputable English program and dance programs. I’ll never know.