Isn't It A Funny Thing...

...how once you make up your mind that you're finished with something you suddenly start noticing EVERY LITTLE THING that's wrong with it whatever that situation may be?

Let me explain;

I've had jobs that ran the full gamut of suckiness; All the way from jobs that barely sucked at all to jobs that sucked to the enth degree.
Still, I was always able to accept things as they were and put my time in and my best foot forward.But once I decided to quit whatever the job in question was and put my two week notice in every day...no, every moment seemed to last an eternity.
Maybe I would have coasted through 4 or 5 years with a positive attitude but those final two weeks were sheer Hell for no reason aside from my knowledge that the end was within sniffing distance.

Same thing with relationships;
I was always able to overlook whatever potentially unattractive characteristics my then-girlfriend/squeeze possessed and focus on their better qualities.
That is, until I decided that I was going to be getting out in the near future. It always seemed that once I had decided that this relationship had just about run it's course I would begin to notice every word the girl or woman in question mispronounced, every dumb opinion they expressed, how obnoxious they looked when they chewed their food and how cheap their perfume smelled.

Now I'll be the first to admit that any or perhaps all of those things that drove me buggy had existed from the beginning...heck, some of them were the very things I had found appealing in the beginning but once I knew I was soon to be out of there those little things suddenly seemed so annoying that I wanted to crawl out of my skin.

Sadly, I can now say that the same dynamic exists in my living situation;
I have loved my neighborhood since I first moved here about 16 years ago and many times said that I planned to always live here.
While others said my neighborhood was "scary" I would call it "working class".
When others would call it "run down" I would call it "affordable".
When others would say "It's nice to finally see a few people fixing their houses up" I would say "See! I told you things were on the upswing in this area!"

Well, a few weeks ago I decided that we are going to try to move by next Spring or maybe Summer.
There have been a number of situations that have arisen in the recent past that gave us cause to rethink our living situation but the truth is that we have simply outgrown our humble home; Both physically and otherwise.

And since I made the decision to begin getting my ducks in a row in order to facilitate said move a funny thing has happened.
I now am painfully aware of every white kid with his pants drooping down around his knees, every black kid wearing a skull cap or a "do-rag", every redneck with a mullet and every bleached blonde in line at the corner store who is letting her dark roots show.
My radar now picks up on every Pit Bull I see, every backfiring El Camino I hear (or were they gunshots?) and every shopping cart I see on the sidewalk.
It even extends to my very own domicile which was up until now the object of my deepest affections;

I get annoyed by every ant that needs stompin' on, every weed that needs pullin' and every gutter that needs cleaning.

Now I know that "the grass isn't always greener on the other side of the fence" but I sure as hell look forward to living in a mullet free, do-rag free, El Camino free community.