"I See It Different"

Let’s start with the analogy, and I’ll come back to it later.

If I remember.

In an episode of Seinfeld, George Costanza explains to Jerry, concerning the issue of lying,

“It’s not a lie, if you believe it.”

(A condition we have been living with nationally since 2016.)

Okay, so there’s this.

When I was, like, five years old, the Toronto Hebrew Day School provided a “taxi” to take us to school, which was downtown and where we lived wasn’t.

Mr. Rosen regularly drove our “taxi.”  And one day bringing me home, as he walked me up to my mother waiting at our open front door to greet me, Mr. Rosen offers an unsolicited comment, concerning my five year-old demeanor:

“Your son is a chronic complainer”, says Mr. Rosen.

Not just a complainer, mind you.  A chronic complainer.   It takes time to establish yourself as “a chronic complainer.”  When did I start, when I was two?  Or prenatally?

“It’s too dark in here!”

Okay, here’s the thing.

Mr. Rosen picked us up in order of how far away we lived from the school, advancing closer to our pedagogical destination with each “pick-up.”  Due to geographical  circumstances beyond my control, I was one of the earlier “pick-ups”,

giving me one of the three seats in the back of the “taxi”, which was fine. 

For the moment.

However, as Mr. Rosen picked up subsequent “customers”, they were instructed to sit on top of the kids, already sitting in the back seat. 

Now there were three kids sitting on top of the three kids sitting in the back seat.

Still manageable.

Till they were followed by yet a third layer of “customers.”

Making it now nine kids sitting in the back seat. 

Three layers of three.

With me, smothered at the bottom of one of those layers.

So I say something about it.

Hoping I might, rotatingly, move up.

Because the children sitting on top of me are heavy,

I am unable to see,

And close to being unable to breathe.

And from that mention of legitimate unfairness and distress,

I earn the branding reputation

As “a chronic complainer.”

“Fast Forward” to this blog.

Shipments of Kind Bars arrive that I never requested.

And I say something about it.

Bi-monthly boxes of Altoids show up when I had ordered but one.

And I say something about it.

An unsent royalty payment was made virtually impossible for me to register to receive.

And I say something about it.

(By the way, I am still waiting for that payment.)

And most recently, while trying to recover a five-dollar penalty from Lyft because their defective “Tracking Device” sent the car to the wrong place and I was charged five dollars for not being there, in the process of rectifying that error, a car was mistakenly dispatched to pick me up and I was penalized ten dollars for not being there either.

And I am saying something about that right now.  (Without devoting an entire post to it, because it’s the same story, with just different specifics.)

Now…

You could say I am still “a chronic complainer.”

Or, as with “It’s not a lie, if you believe it”, you could say,

“It’s not complaining, if it is verifiably correct.”

“Yes, it is.”

Why?

“Because of the whiny tone and sense of personal entitlement.”

I’m being punished for a genetic sinus condition and drawing attention to actual injustice?  That is so incredibly unfair.

“Here we go again.”

Man, you can't win.

Even on your own blog.