Tuesday, June 3, 2014

One of those days

It's one of those days where I wake up too late after strange dreams to find the basement is flooded. Getting clean and dressed for work I drop things: razor, toothbrush, socks. It's the beginning of a day where just about everything falls out of my hands, figures out someplace dark, spider-filled, and hard to reach, and rolls there. I don't even have to drop something round. It can be square and sticky and today it will still find a way to roll thirty feet to under the center of a low shelf. At that point it will resume its square sticky properties as if it was completely innocent of any bizarre acrobatics. "You're the one who threw me here." It seems to say. "I was perfectly happy being carried by you."

Naturally I am running late for work. The toilet doesn't flush. I can't find the DVD that's overdue and needs to go back today. Perhaps it is in the toilet clogging the drain? And of course, when I drop my jar of cold press on the kitchen floor, even though my house is quite small, it rolls a full 700 feet away from me. I consider getting a bike to go get it. Eh, at least it didn't break.

Work is more of the same. I lose the ability to type. There are no books anyone wants that I can find. When I am working on the machine all the annoying things happen. The wrong sorts of bins fill. The unpleasant items are returned. I can't seem to plug anything in.

At home again I drain the basement and it promptly floods. I write a blog post and the computer crashes. Well, it wasn't much of a blog post, just a litany of things going askew. It's still today so I'll note that I typed the word "litany" with a wholly incorrect first letter six times before I got to the right one; "k", "t" (embarrassing!), "i", "k" (again), "o", and "j".

The weird thing is it's not a bad day. I am not in a bad mood. I can't say it's not irritating to have to do everything three times, but it's not irritating to have to do everything three times. I never know ahead of time it will take three tries, so it's like narrowing down, or a matter of briefly going through a short learning process for every action I take. How do I hold a patron's library card? Like this! Oops, no, like th... er, sorry, I've, ah, I've got it! That's not so bad. And thus all of the mundane things I do in a day, unthinking, with meaningless mastery, have been transformed by failure into something else. Successes.

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