Even when you're at wit's end, there is good and bad. Not black and white, but some things definitely better and preferable to others. Like Thursday and Friday nights at the lab. The former because it usually means the end of a day of meetings, meetings, followed up by one more meeting. As for Friday night, it's actually the only night I close my eyes knowing that I won't have to open them up until almost as late as I'd like the next afternoon.
This week, the streak of good Thursdays came to a grinding halt. Actually, I didn't have a particularly bad day. Instead, someone else's Thursday evening collided with mine, sending debris into the figurative sidewalks of my head. Even now, I don't remember her name. Or maybe I hadn't bothered to ask. But I did ask her if she were
alright (it was the most appropriate word I could think of, tired and all). I managed to further gather her hometown, where she went to medical college, and even her wedding date. At the end though, I couldn't bring myself to ask what actually happened. In all fairness, it was really none of my business - though when someone's Thursday runs a junction and awkwardly dents yours, there is some validity to my enquiry. And when they're sitting right across from you nervously waiting for a call from 10 timezones away, it's hard to think of anything else to say.
A bad sleep, and a few days to digest all this and I finally see the irony of all this. We can claim to put our relentless efforts into curing disease, defying aging, and rescinding pain. Yet perhaps the one thing we can't prevent from hurting us is the closest thing there is. Will we ever be able to save us from ourselves? What would the Sartres and Nietzches and Toellueques say? And what if he beat her, then went to take a night class in bedside manner?
But the biggest irony may be for all that I ruse about this, it would have dissolved into the recesses of the big temporal cavern if it weren't for the pain in my wrist from mouse dragging. Perhaps we really do need pain, to keep us aware of what important, progressive, meaningful work we live for. Perhaps we just need reminders. Lots of them.
