A Few Thoughts on Karma

Yeah, yeah, elections last night and the GOP has shown that it's been recovering since last November. I don't feel like addressing that right now. Here's what's on my mind:

Yesterday I started the application process to become a substitute teacher in my local district, and I have the official interview next Tuesday. I did it because H1N1 has created a new demand for them, and their supply has been more or less at a low constant for a while. So, naturally, I wake up this morning feeling sick.

It's just a bad cold, but still. Sometimes I notice that the only proof I have that karma exists is when it's bad karma.

I try to do good by people, and I'm constantly told that the karmic payback will eventually be totally kick-ass. Just the other day, I told a friend over IM that if she went to a friend's place where we all spent Halloween and found my abandoned half-jug of Carlo Rossi that she should feel free to take it and enjoy. In the past, random acts of kindness prompt similar responses that she gave me on the Rossi thing, which for some reason I can't help but imagine being said by Sarah Palin: "Well you're just rackin' up the good karma, don'tcha know?"

But, over the years, gornischt. So I usually didn't think much of karma, because I had little proof. Then I make one calculated career move (not even a career move - since I lack my teaching certificate, it's part-time work) based on a mild pandemic, and within hours I'm knocked on my ass by cosmic forces I cannot comprehend.

I have a theory, though: karma operates much on the same level of the internet. It's a series of tubes. One can send too many internets and plug up the tubes (as they great and powerful Sen. Ted Stevens has made painfully clear), karma works the same way.

Somewhere they must sell karmic plungers, and if I had to hazard a guess I'd say it's somewhere in Tibet. I have a feeling that, like the Three Stooges trying to enter a room, my good karma tubes have been blocked off by the over-saturation of goodness. Or maybe hair and stuff got stuck in there over the years (karma tubes are more personal than the internet).

Or maybe even lime deposits. We have hard water out where I live. What I need is a karma snake to put down the tubes and knock away the blockage.

In conclusion, don't exploit global pandemics for personal gain, or karma will kill you in the face.