A Salieri Moment

[billroper]

This is an old story that popped back up because the movie, Amadeus, came up while catalana was visiting last weekend. In fact, this story occurred not too long after the movie had been in the theaters.

Antonio Salieri (in the movie) was the composer who was constantly frustrated by Mozart. One of my favorite lines of his was, "God was laughing at me."

So I was going through a pretty severe downcycle in my relationship with the opposite sex at the time. The woman who I had been dating -- or, at least, doing something that looked like dating although I'm not sure that she would have said we were dating which kind of gives you a picture of the whole relationship -- was in one of those moods where I was thinking that being somewhere else (hey, anywhere else) would be a good idea. I'd just finished lunch at the Main Cafe and was walking home down Main Street considering the situation.

"You really need to get out of this relationship and find somebody else," I thought to myself. "There are millions of women out there in the world that you could go out with. Surely you can find someone who would be better than continuing in this fiasco."

I looked up and saw a woman approaching from some distance away. "Take that woman, for instance. She's probably a perfectly fine person. You could strike up a conversation with her and who knows what might happen? It surely couldn't be worse."

And then she got close enough for me to identify her. It was a woman that I knew, a woman who was on my list of people that I would not want to be involved with ever, no how, no way.

Oh, and she was also already married anyway.

And I felt a lot of empathy for Salieri at that moment, because God was clearly laughing at me.

Of course, now I'm married to daisy_knotwise and I like to think that God spends a lot more time laughing with us than he does laughing at us.