Over Promise, Under Deliver
Consider this my celebrity notes app apology (I actually wrote it in my notes for the full effect)
Let’s skip the pleasantries and get right into today’s lecture. Last week I teased something special, something that I thought would make for a nice end to the Loft Chapter. From the bottom of my heart, I swear I had every intention to keep that promise. Until I accidentally scratched my eyeball during our move on Saturday, of course.
Sometimes if you ask the right questions, your movers will wrap your furniture in moving blankets for you and tape them down for security. Our movers did just that, and there work was very…..thorough. We moved into an apartment building with no central air, and made the movers move our furniture up and down three flights of stairs per building (six in total), so we wanted to help speed the process along and remove their blankets as a thank you for their hard work.
I had taken off at least four other blankets before realizing the movers had put our bar cart-turned-TV-stand into Caroline’s room by accident. We decided we would move it ourselves to relieve some of their stress, and then we began ripping. If only I had known that pulling on a thick layer of tape too aggressively would make the tape snap and whip me directly in the eye, maybe I would’ve made them move it instead.
That first night was extremely painful (duh), and honestly, kind of scary. My vision was obviously a lot blurrier than normal, but it wasn’t until I left the apartment to catch my Uber, roughly 2-3 hours after the incident, that I realized there was some major distortion happening in the upper righthand corner of my eye. The best way I can describe it is it felt like I was looking through one of those ugly bathroom window tiles (see below for reference). And then things really took a turn for the worse when I was rudely accosted by the fluorescent lights in the urgent care waiting room. Why are they so harsh??? Clearly they never considered that a fragile girl with an eye scratch could stumble in at any moment and have her world turned completely on its side. Seems irresponsible…
I know I describe a lot things that happen to me as “dumb,” but I feel pretty confident in saying that this is by far the dumbest of them all. (Actually I’m going to edit this in real time and say I once fucked up my back by just sitting in a chair and I’m still paying for it 8 years later, so no, a little eyeball scratch from some packing tape doesn’t even come close to being my dumbest injury or life story in general. My parents just threw away that chair this weekend, and I can’t help but feel like this is all some kind of upsetting metaphor about how disposing of the things that bring us pain won’t make the pain disappear because pain follows you forever or some bullshit like that.)
If you couldn’t already tell, I like to deduct reasoning from every little event that happens in my life, because it makes it easier for me to pretend I’m in a 30 minute primetime NBC situational comedy (22 with commercials). The lesson I took from this particular incident is that things can always get worse. This lesson really set in for me when I was waiting for my Uber to the urgent care clinic, and I met my downstairs neighbor who informed me that she was a singer who liked to record her “screamo screams” in the hallway. If you’d like to imagine our interaction for yourself, you should know that I held a bag of frozen corn over my right eye for the entirety of our conversation and she never once asked me about it.
By Monday the scary distortion had cleared up, but I had to do all my work with my right eye shut because the blur was making me ill. I made a typo on some kind-of-important-but-ultimately-reversible ad copy, so one thing you can’t say about me is that I’m a giver-upper. Though I’ve pretty much made a full recovery at this point, my eyeball fiasco did not give me enough time to execute the post I had originally planned for, and for that, I’m very very VERY sorry. But in the end, none of you pay me for this, and so my Ubers to and from the clinic, my $60 copay, and my $12 antibiotic eye drops came out of my own pocket, not yours. If you’ve made it to the end and you’re still upset with me, I implore you to find a lesson in all of this. You know what they say, WWJD? (What would Jill do?)
Without making any promises I can’t keep, I’m hopeful that next week’s post will worth the wait. Class dismissed.