Writer's Notebook, Day Seven-Hundred-And--Eighty-Three

It is very frustrating to me that I am always told that I need to wait and get lucky in my career.  This is partly because I think it rather absurd that I have spent so much time and money on developing as a professional, with that as the clear goal of what I was pursuing, only to be told at the end, it was not at all about actually starting a career and had not prepared me to overcome the real obstacles.  However, it is also a matter of not wanting to be asked to rely upon luck when I have extremely terrible luck in general. On a daily basis, I have things that go wrong in ways most people dismiss as random occurrence, things that happen on occasion to everyone, but happen to me with shocking regularity.  If restaurants messed up most people's orders as often as they do mine, for example, that would mean that almost every table at a restaurant has at least one person who did not receive what they ordered.  At present, the house where I live does not have a functional kitchen, so we have needed to order food, and it was more unusual for me to get what I ordered than not, and in almost every case, any other food was fine.  In some cases, a number of items were missing or wrong, but they were only items from my order.  Even when I ordered a bagel from a drive through coffee place, they gave me the wrong type, which I know is insignificant, but when it comes after three meals in a row where your food is not right, the issue is not really the bagel,  This is, of course, a minor and petty set of examples, but I can tell of others, of how I often find that bad things come piling on in strange ways like a sudden hurricane threatened just enough to disrupt and complicate my move last year, and how the move was punctuated with Ulysses suddenly getting ill, and his dying just as we began to settle in (I am still sad in this office, precisely because it the one room Ulysses never entered in his short time here).  I have a good friend who taught college mathematics and specialized in statistics, and he has acknowledged the oddity of my bad luck.  These are, of course, still only small examples, and it is not easy to offer anything more than specific examples, even though it is a matter of the whole and not the parts themselves.  However, even if you do not believe me, I am sure you can understand that it is the reality of my feelings, and maybe it makes sense, in that context, just why I am so scared to think any success in my chosen career must rely upon luck, no matter how hard I work or how much talent I might have.  It seems the kind of thing that would happen to me, what with all the rest.