Please Don't Drop the Potatoes...

So a about a week ago Jamie picked out a movie for us to rent called "On a Clear Day" about a guy that decides to swim the English Channel. (I picked out "Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children", cuz of the ultimate geek that I am, and come to think I haven't returned it yet cuz I wanted to watch the "Making of" featurettes...but that's all besides the point.) So anyhoo, the movie takes place in...I think Ireland. But anyway, there is a character in a movie that is of some Asian background, and he owns a fish and chips shop, and people in general blatantly don't treat him too well, I guess because of his nationality, etc etc. Such as they repeatedly just assume he doesn't speak English, they laugh at him, etc. So a subplot is that throughout the movie he repeatedly gets potatoes delivered to his restaurant, and the man that delivers them inevitably drops (literally) the sack of potatoes just inside the front door, and the bag rips and the potatoes fly everywhere. The owner watches it every week, but as with all the other maltreatment he gets in his life, he never says anything about it. So the man drops the sack of potatoes, and says "See ya next week," every time. And the owner just accepts it. Well to make a long story short (too late, I know), by the end of the movie the owner of the restaurant has helped his buddy with the impossible task of swimming the English channel, and finally gets the nerve to say something to the potato dude. So what happens is the potato dude does his usual thing, of coming in and JUST about drops the sack of potatoes when the owner finally says something: "Please, please don't drop the potatoes," fully expecting the potato guy to be totally rude and drop them anyway. But the potato guy very calmly, sets the potatoes down, like nothing is different and simply says: "OK. See ya next week," and walked out the door. Right as rain (as my hubby would say.) So obviously even though it seemed that the potato guy was being discriminatory, he really wasn't, he just didn't realize what he was doing.

So the moral of the story is, sometimes we can create stories in our heads about how we think life is, or how we think that people are treating us or feel about us, and frankly, we can be wrong. Yes there are going to be people in our lives that don't like us and are mean to us, but there are also going to be times when the way we perceive someone as being, or how we perceive them as perceiving us, is just not accurate.