portents

Every time I'm writing something that proves significant in my life, I end up hurting my eyes or hands. It’s never on purpose, but evidently my subconscious plots against my progress. When I was working on my master’s thesis proposal, which ended up as part of my PhD writing samples, I managed to accidentally pour contact cleanser into my right eye instead of saline solution. That put me back in my glasses for a week. That same semester, I was working on a seminar paper that also became a writing sample, and I burned my fingertips right when I needed to be typing the most.

Since then, I've become accustomed to such things to the point that they don’t really stick in my memory. But these past two weeks, I’ve been working on what might become my first published article. It’s certainly the first article anyone has invited me to write based on a conference presentation. Last week, I managed to run into a doorjamb and whack my left pinkie, which is still vaguely unhappy. And earlier this week I somehow slept on my eyelids wrong, with the end result being that I woke up with my eyelids more or less turned inside out and one eye pressed directly against the cotton pillowcase. Much unhappiness and grossness has ensued.

(This also explains why I only went swimming on Tuesday this week. There’s no way I’m getting chlorine in that unhappy eye.)

I’m choosing to believe that maybe all this nonsense means that this piece of writing will also prove significant for me. We’ll find out.