Today was one of those days. I knew it wasn't going to work. I knew I should have buried my head under the covers and feigned some kind of womanly ailment. But I, rather unwisely, stepped out of bed and ventured into the day. Let's just start with the fact that I got back from work at 10:00 pm last night and had to be up and ready by 7:30 for another 12 hour day. I was so tired that I had lost my appetite. Ellie had made rice and what I think is a local Mexican stew. I tried a few spoonfuls and resigned. The work of chewing and swallowing was too exhausting. See, if I had done something worthwhile, my joy from the achievement would override my fatigue. But there was nothing to show for all those hours.
So I knew today was one of those days. I should have just switched off. My watch broke, another sign that I ignored. I do not use my phone to tell the time. I actually rarely use my phone at all while at work. That watch was a sign I should have paid attention to. I skipped breakfast, thinking I could snack in the office. I learnt today that nothing fills a belly like fruitful work. No matter what I snacked on, I could not have enough. A coke, coffee, chocolate cake and chocolate chip cookies later, I was starving. Meanwhile all that typing away at my keyboard did not do anything to change the amount of work left. Maybe it's because I was translating half the time. That's it, I'll blame it on google translate. After all writing in one language and switching to another is like writing twice, isn't it?
Somewhere in the middle of all of that, I was given what seemed to be a basic task. I was to calibrate a basic machine, generate a graph and voila! I killed that machine and confirmed once and for all that I have 2 left hands. See, there's this idea that's been creeping at the edges of my mind that I may not be as technically apt as I ought to be. Most engineers have stories of curiosity about the inner workings of machines or chemical systems as they were growing up. Most of them remember tearing up a toy or breaking home appliances or playing with hydrogen peroxide and baking soda. I have no such memories. I remember that I liked crafting and once thought I would be a cartoonist. Perhaps the closest I came to engineering was the time I thought I would try being a chocolatier, though that only lasted a day. After one attempt, I was cured of my madness. Then there was that time that I thought I would become an environmentalist because of a teacher at school. For months I recycled straws, bottle tops and random titbits. Then I thought I would pursue music and become an orchestra conductor. I really thought that I had a future in classical music, never mind that I couldn't play a single instrument coherently. Then, more recently, I realised I was interested in education and the teaching of children. There's nothing in there about a broken toy or a destroyed television. So when today's fiasco happened, I was non-too-surprised. I spent 5 hours trying to fix a problem that I caused and still failed. Something about screw drivers and batteries and saturated salts and electrodes.
I give up. I'm off to bed! Tomorrow, nothing will convince me to risk work again!
I was going to end the day like this but it seems God still has a thing or two left to teach me. I told Ellie about my day and we had a Spanglish conversation about the technical bits of the machine that I had broken. She made my mess seem less messier and manageable. She also made me feel like perhaps, I wasn't as badly off as I thought. See, preparation is key. All those stories about broken toys, TVs and exploding peroxide/soda concoctions are people preparing for their journey. Maybe I missed out on a few steps or I took a couple of detours, but it's never too late to get up onto the horse, even if it may take me a bit longer to get through the horse-riding classes [my English teacher would be proud of the illustrations I just threw into that statement]. I'll take tomorrow off, to cool my head. But maybe, just maybe, there is hope at the end of this lament.
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