Then I Decided to Snoop Around...

Cyprus has been home to a lot of my firsts.  This would include my first trip to visit a butcher.  If you know me well enough I’m not a meat eater.  I hate hamburgers, but I learned that butcher and I had more in common then I thought.

I try to forget that the first thing I saw when we arrived was a man pulling a whole lamb from the meat locker.  I was also trying to avoid noticing the chunks of meat on the ground, and the huge knives just sitting around.

Yes, that's raw meat just sitting there. Gross!

At this point, I was thanking God I wasn’t responsible for this shoot, and I took on the daunting role of sitting with everyone’s stuff for a while.  I spent sometime hanging out at somebody’s desk, and I couldn’t help but snoop around.   The more I looked I realized this guy is a mess, just like me.

There were evil eye charms hanging around everywhere, so clearly he’s superstitious like me.  Pictures of saints that mad me think of Bible verses that I keep pinned up as a reminder to keep up the faith when times got tough.  There was a clock, radio, unsorted books, and calculator because I imagined he had trouble with math too.  Everything right down to this hat that resembled an orange one I have as a basketball game freebie, resembled my desk back in Knoxville.  Somehow for some odd reason I was able to muster up a level of connection.

Just chillin'

The more I sat there and looked around I soon became envious.  The butcher shop was simple.  Smiling customers came in and out like they had been here a million times before, and lively banter between co-workers.  This was the type of simplicity that people try so hard to attain in their lives, and here it was at a butcher shop.

Inspiration stems from weird places. Turns out one of my worst enemies (O.K. that’s exaggerating a bit), was a lot like me after all.  I’ve already established that I don’t intend to be a butcher, but I’m at a stage where I need to some thought into my future profession. I’ve got a wide variety of interests, and there are days I worry that I’ll be stuck somewhere unhappy.  Seeing that another mess like me could successfully find his place in the world gave me hope.