11 March 2007

Good news, bad news

When I was a kid my mom always used to tell this story about a staid bloke who hears "You've won the lottery!" and replies, "Good news, bad news." Everyone thinks he's unappreciative of his good luck. He buys a new car with his winnings and then finds out that somebody has stolen it. "Good news, bad news" he says. "Oh," says his friend the next day, "turns out that car had bad brakes and the guy who stole it crashed it into a tree. Imagine what would've happened if you had driven it!"



"Good news, bad news." I forget the exact details, but you get the idea.



I was thinking about it recently as I was turned down for a job at the UW, but wasn't particularly broken up about it. The moral of the story, of course, is that life is a complicated place and we can rarely appreciate the consequences of anything we do or anything that happens to us.



And true to form, despite hearing bad news from UW, I'm generally
happier now than I have been in a long time. At the moment I'm chilling
in Seattle, listening to the Pogues, and it feels pretty good. I just
had a really nice week in Colorado — fantastic weather, good scenery,
interesting work and a really cool bunch of people to hang out with —
and I'm about to have two (hopefully!) great weeks here with a whole
crew of visiting people from Oxford. We'll probably do a little skiing,
cook some dinners together in the apartment complex where we're all
staying, work hard during the day, and hopefully some other good stuff
as well.



I think I've found a good network of friends in Oxford (just as I'm
looking for a job elsewhere — how clever of me) and work has been
really rewarding and exciting of late (although evidently the losers at
UW don't think so).2007 is looking good so far.



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