I have a tendency to keep score, in my head, of the fair-to-unfair balance of my personal universe at any given time. The scoresheet exists for one reason, and that is to help me justify doing or getting extravagant nice things for myself. These things are usually somewhat out of proportion to the unfairnesses that they're intended to remedy: I have just stubbed my toe so terribly that I need a big stack of new books to read while I lie in bed waiting for it to heal. I'm sad that it's cold out, so I need to eat this entire cake to make myself feel better. A five-page paper?! How dare they? Nothing but lots of stripey socks will make this okay! You get the idea.
Once in a while something like Fiasco Week will come along and tip the balance so far in one direction that it's not really possible to equalize, so I'll give up for a while and start keeping score again when things have settled back down. That is not what happened this weekend. What happened this weekend was that fair and unfair succeeded each other in such dizzying and contradictory oscillations that I've actually lost track.
See, I spent Friday being capital-G good. It was the last day of Spring Break and I was here at work doing things which weren't technically my responsibility but which saved other people from various terrible fates. I did paperwork for the faculty so that students' graduation wouldn't be held up. I intervened between the graduate studies office and students who were about to lose their jobs over grading errors. By the end of the day I deserved a damn halo, and what I got instead was looking in the mirror on the way home and discovering that one of my absolute favorite wood plugs had fallen out of my earlobe. I scoured the building to no avail; it was gone. To restore my faith in the justice of the universe, I bought myself a pair of beautiful swirly green glass ear danglies and went to my local music store to find some cheering music. The fact that I couldn't find an acceptable copy of the album I absolutely had to have warranted the additional restorative measure of having an enormous pecan sticky bun for dinner and going home to watch movies.
This is where it got weird. I found my missing plug in my bed, where it had fallen out the night before and I just hadn't noticed. So, okay, all of my justification for the new jewelry and music -- and therefore the sticky bun dinner -- evaporated. I spent the rest of the weekend being good; I even did my taxes like a responsible citizen even though my mid-year move made them, frankly, a bitch. I thought that warranted trying another record store for the elusive album (Hunky Dory, if you were wondering), but 2nd Avenue Records was closed and I came home freezing and empty-handed. At roughly this point my beloved sister called me for help with her bewilderingly fucked-up blog, and I did my technologically-limited best to help unfuck it. When we hung up after some limited success, I hopped in the shower and in so doing dropped one of my new, beautiful, fragile glass ear swirlies on the nice hard bathroom floor.
Since it's Monday morning, people keep asking me how my weekend was. So far all I've really been able to do is give them confused looks and reach for a pencil and paper to try to calculate the answer.
Posted by dianna at March 31, 2008 11:50 AM