Things Fall Apart

The last couple of weeks have been an action-packed grand finale leading up to today, my birthday.  The latest little fiasco in our lives here at the homestead is the sudden death of the laptop due to a reckless urge to push my daughter toward adulthood by giving her an open cup of milk (as opposed to the lidded variety).  As soon as the cup was tipped and the milk pooled around the back of the laptop, a memory flashed of not two months ago when my daughter (who will, from this point forward on the blog will be referred to as "Little D") knocked over my cup of coffee and drenched the keyboard.  There was only one noticeable malfunction after this, but it was one we couldn't live with.  The poor thing was sent away for three weeks, and came back with the a new fully functional right shift key. 

And here we are again, I thought.  I closed it up to wipe it down and found milk running out the back of the screen.  When I opened it up and hit power...nothing.  So, Hubs and Little D promptly transported the coma patient to Geek Squad urgent care, and we were told we will get it back in 2 to 4 weeks, good as new--literally, with all of those pesky photos, word documents, and videos we had saved on it wiped clean.  We had to decide if it was worth a hundred and fifty bucks to save this stuff.  People always say they'll run back into the burning house for just one thing: their photos.   I found that I'll sell mine down the river for $150.  Ah, the adventures of self-discovery.

In other developments, my car has decided to start freaking out.  Nothing structural, just fun electrical quirks.  Like one recent night, I was leaving school, exhausted and still riding high on the adrenaline of parent teacher open house, when I got in the car to find the electric panel telling me that I had 2000 miles left on this tank of gas.  When I toggled over to the "current miles per gallon feature," imagine my delight when I found that my car was now getting 240 miles to the gallon.  Unfortunately, as I barreled toward home, it slowly transitioned from spontaneous super hybrid back my predictable German work horse.  I sadly watched the numbers fall as I sped down I-275.  190 mpg,  165 mpg, 110 mpg, 55 mpg...28 mpg.  And that was that.

This week, it's fun with the turn signals.  It's my fault, because just before it started, I was silently cursing an old man who drifted about in front of me several times, never using his turn signal.  What, you never heard of turn signal, I thought.  Then I righteously flipped on mine.  After I executed my turn the blinker stopped, but the clicker went haywire.  The normal, steady rhythm of a turn signal is a non-assuming "click click...click click."  Well now, after my turn is made and my blinker turns off, the sound effect of the blinker likes to play a little avant garde jazz number after.  "click click click click click click click click...clickclick.......................click" it might say, or some variation on that theme.  It might bust out into a solo, three, six, even ten times over a period of five minutes after I make a turn.  Sometimes, it likes to surprise me with a spontaneous serenade when I haven't made a turn in miles, just to remind me of it's skill.  If it weren't so annoying, it might be funny.

And the adventures don't stop with technologies.  My body is keeping it real too.  First, it was the dilated eye.  One morning a couple weeks ago, I woke up with a red and itchy eye, some allergic reaction to cat dander or spores of some sort.  I dropped a couple Visine allergy drops into the eye before I walked into school, so as not to scare the children with my bloodshot teacher eye.   The morning began with a staff meeting, in which I noticed the presenters getting progressively blurrier.  I kept rubbing my eye, wondering if I accidentally switched my contacts when I put them in.  Talking to a counselor after the meeting, she asked me, "Is your eye okay?"  She informed me that it was almost completely dilated, "like the meth patients I'd see when I worked in intake at the drug rehab clinic."  

"Call a doctor," my colleagues told me.  "We'll cover for you if you have to go to the ER," they said.  

I went straight to a mirror and found my eye looking like this:

Had I unwittingly done meth this morning? Was I having a stroke?  WTF, I worried.  After a long time on hold with the doctor's office (while I tried to teach my first hour tethered to my phone table), I found out that this is a side effect of Visine allergy drops.  They sell these things at Rite Aid and this is a common side effect?  "Give it time," the nurse told me.  "If it isn't improved by tomorrow, call us."  So I went on teaching, no doubt disturbing the young people with my freakish meth-addict eye, and the next morning it was mostly back to normal.

Next, I came down with the never ending cold from hell, which ebbed and flowed over a couple weeks, but culminated finally in the almost complete loss of my voice.  At school, I struggled to explain figurative language techniques. As my voice gradually eroded, I went from Harvey Fierstein impersonator in the morning to a squeaky mime by afternoon.  I took the next day off.  

But the adventures didn't stop there. A few days ago I woke up with a pinched nerve in my neck.  Again with a staff meeting in the morning.  In this one, I discovered that if I turned too sharply to the right I would receive a crippling jolt of pain to my neck.  I had to hold myself very still with my head cocked slightly to the left, which resulted in me seeming extra interested in the presentation on ESL learners. Back to the classroom with a fun new quirk.  This time as Frankenstein, I enlightened my seventh graders on the difference between alliteration, consonance and assonance, periodically stopping to wail and wait for a paralyzing pang to pass.  "This is a pain in the assonance," I told them.

Leaving school that day, on my way to emergency appointment for a massage and a chiropractic adjustment, I turned to look over my shoulder to back out and was jolted with a bolt of pain to my neck.  At the same instant my blinker started going nuts again.  This time the radio decided to join in, rhythmically beating a duet of static every time the blinker clicked.  The ridiculousness of my life at that moment hit me and I burst into a fit of giggles, tasered by waves of pain as my shoulders shook with laughter.

I turn 35 today.  I want to believe that this series of unfortunate events was a test of will, an individually designed rite of passage into my late 30s.  I finished this entry once already...yesterday.  It was my last day of being 34.  I awoke early, got my coffee and sat down to write.  I banged out a decent end to this sad tale.  Satisfied with it, I got into the shower and got ready for work, glad that I had finally finished my first blog entry since returning to school.  When I got home yesterday, Hubs informed me that the desktop had crashed and I discovered that everything I wrote that morning was lost.   

Today, the first day of my new age, so far...so good.  I've picked up the pieces and tried to recapture what I wrote yesterday, tried to make it better, even.   Yeats wrote, "The center cannot hold; things fall apart." But could he have ever have predicted the invention of Superglue?  Things can be put back together.  We can march out of adversity stronger for having faced it.  I am choosing to believe these tests of my will are complete, and I've passed dammit.  I can laugh at myself.  I'm older, wiser and ready to reap the rewards of my resilience.  Bring it on 35.  Bring it on.