The good & the bad

I hope everyone is having a great 3-day weekend (For those that do not live in the U.S., we have a national holiday on Monday)!! I wish I could say that my weekend has been fantastic – but truth to be told, there were moments of blah. For a while, I was hesitant to write something on my blog. My blog has always been so happy, except for few occasional  frustrating posts, thus it seemed like an odd move for me to suddenly throw you cold water in your face. But you know, this is life, & there are definitely moments in life that you learn to accept. I intend to share those bad moments with you today.

My weekend started out good. I got a much needed haircut & had a refreshing look.

I then went to Target to print out 200 photos that I wanted to place in the photo album that I received as a gift long time ago. It is a red photo album that Mrs. B. bought for me as holiday gift but I hadn’t used at all until I decided what the theme was going to be. I decided that my album was going to consist of my two New York trips in the last 5 year period.

I was also very excited that my first newsletter for Discovery Park was distributed on Friday afternoon. It was a new marketing initiative that I worked really hard on & was very satisfied with the first outcome of many, as it planned on to become a bi-monthly newsletter. About 4200 students were expected to receive it. Boyfriend was also coming that day, so I was overall a very happy person.

And then bad things happened…

My unfortunate obsession with work email later led me to a forwarded email from my boss (By no means, in advance, was she trying to make me feel horrible. It was simply an for-your-information kind of email). It was a hate mail from an engineering student that just received the newsletter. Long story short – a computer science major student thought that the newsletter was absolutely hideous because it wasn’t sophisticated enough. It was not a HTML newsletter, where links that I embedded could be of direct access to the respective website. It was simply an image newsletter. That student was extremely disappointed that we, as an office representing the university & college of engineering, could not create a sophisticated HTML newsletter – aka we failed to represent the university. My intention was to simply inform them with current events and future workshops as a new mean of communication, but he/she was more concerned with how it looked…

That was a big blow to my evening. My first interaction was my hatred towards that student – the careless, inconsiderate, & mean tone that carried throughout the email. He/she could’ve written respectfully but as a tone of constructive criticism. Why people have to be mean when it’s something that they personally don’t approve? And then I was disappointed that some students don’t appreciate what my department is trying to do for them. But then, I am not here to be appreciated, but I certainly wish sometimes that they understand what we do. It took me a while to calm down & let go of the negativity in me. I eventually did with a support of my boyfriend.

The next afternoon, Z had realized that the hot water is not coming out. So I checked – it wasn’t coming out. That was the second blow to my weekend. Taking a icy, cold shower wasn’t going to do it for both of us in a non-summer season. However, since hygiene is in fact important & a big part of my life, we had to be a little creative. Let’s just say we had all four stoves running hot & wild with 4 small & big pots while the bathtub was being somewhat filled with icy water. I would’ve taken some pictures, but I wasn’t in the mood. Yes, that’s how we each took our bath. It was adventurous yet frustrating. I don’t feel as clean as I should be feeling.

Well, it’s Monday afternoon & we were able to get hold of a maintenance crew. Thankfully it was just a circuit that just went out for a precautionary measure (I don’t know why that would happen), but hopefully it should warm up the water pretty soon.

In a matter of one weekend I learned a lot about life & about myself. That these little bad things over the weekend are just one of many bad things that will happen in life. You can’t always make everyone happy – and the people pleaser I am, this is a difficult meaning to life. But I sure can’t beat myself up every hour thinking why that person acted the way he/she did or what I did wrong.  I will just have to learn to let go of some negativity but still do hard in everything I do.

For now, all my focus is on my new classes beginning tomorrow & another new day of challenge at work. I’m going to try enjoying this extra weekend day as much as I can.