The Jinxed Blog Post

Years and years ago, I worked for a bank. Most of the customers were decent people; they took errors in stride and showed us respect as we tried to sort things out.

But every branch office had its few problem customers for whom nothing would ever be good enough. For these folks, there was nothing that a bank employee could do that would satisfy their need to complain, often loudly and in inappropriate ways.

I found over the years that whenever I had to deal with those particular customers, I would make some foolish error - whether they were in the branch or not. Extra special care seemed to guarantee an error - the greater the care, the worse the error.

Such people, and the errors that go with them, are my metaphor for trying too hard and for all the things I encounter in life that will just get worse and worse, the harder I try.

Yesterday's blog post about Natalie Goldberg's book was one of those things. Started weeks ago, the post was jinxed from the beginning. Every sentence I began wouldn't work. I knew what I wanted to say, but couldn't spit it out. The images of the book were too big, too small, too not where I knew I had put them.

Finally, the words did come, and as I was almost finished, I hit the "Publish" button by mistake. N-o-o-o! I had wanted the previous post to be the first one visible for longer (and I don't know how to fix something like that). What to do?

I copied the text, deleted the post, then pasted into a new post, which did not seem to work and then seemed to disappear altogether. Oh well, I could always do it over.

When I did begin to do the post over, lo and behold, there was the "lost" one, and with text intact, albeit oddly spaced. I fixed the spacing, re-inserted the images and video, and found and deleted the repetition of it all much further down the page. Ahh, success at last! Publish and be done with it.

Not long after that, the post received its first comment. Yay! But, alas! In responding to the comment, I found not one, but two more iterations of the paste "hanging" off the end of the post with much space between lines. They are now deleted, but I daren't say that all is well.

I dearly want to believe that I am done with that post (well, except for more comments!), but am uncertain because it is jinxed. Maybe, I just won't look, and it will eventually fall off the page into oblivion. At least I don't feel any guilt about wishing such a fate on a blog post.