I HAVENT REACHED ENLIGHTENMENT!

In my Buddhist studies I have recently learned about an excercise to build compassion called the "Tonglen Meditation" where you imagine taking on the suffering of the world, transforming it, and then returning it to the world as light. Today I did the first part, but forgot the whole "transforming" it part. Now I am wallowing and pissed!

I was in a great mood when I came home, but my poor roommate is stressed about finals. We went to a restaurant, and then to Caribou, fucking corprate bastards, charge for internet, so she had to go to another wi-fi spot to do something to her paper, who knows. I went with her, to a great coffee shop five blocks away, assuming it would take about a half hour. Instead something is wrong with her computer and it will take all night to retype it.

Believe me, I feel for her. Poor girl has finals, and an overdue paper to write that suddenly won't show up on her computer. She has a right to be in a pissy mood. But that doesn't mean I had to adopt it. I did, I soaked it up like a sponge.

To top it off she has a car, and we have a parking spot that we were leaving for someone else to use, but now we will be taking. Whoever is displaced I am sure will be upset, I don't know how to go about it except to just park in the space and leave a note. Tera has pretty much left it for me to do. I have been here longer, and I am solely on the lease, but I still feel annoyed that she is adding this stress to me after she already "gave" me her bad mood. (TOTALLY unfair, I know)

There have been some armed robberies in the area so I didn't want either of us walking home alone, so I convinced her to come home with me, I felt like shit about it, becuase she had to deal with her paper, but I thought it would be a half hour, I hadn't signed on for an all night coffee shop excursion. I brought nothing to entertain myself so it was perfectly reasonable for me to want to go home after an hour, especially since something there did a number on my sinuses (they hurt so bad right now!)

Now we are home, and she is happy as a clam watching Jesus Christ Superstar, and I am stressed and pissed. I need to learn how to better be supportive without absorbing someone else's pain. I am angry at her now too, which is SO UNFAIR. And what is even more unfair is imagining how many times I have been a downer.

I wanted to go to Florida tomorrow. Now that I have spent my whole night at fucking coffee shops I didn't pack. It was all my choice I know, but I wish I had made very different ones.

mood: tired, pissy, crabby, resentful, guilty, annoyed, in pain.