Well, against the odds, I got hired. Finally. In aviation. 20 months of wandering in the wilderness and now...who knows. I was supposed to start this week. But car problems. But I got something similar to mono and thought I was dying. My brain still is not fully recovered. Hence the inordinate use of fragments without the justification of poetry. This is how I talk to myself, to my husband, and on the phone right now. Fragmentary.

I got a crock pot this week. I'm scared of it. Because I value food and I hate learning curves and the possibility of ruining a perfectly good meal if I wasn't so damn lazy (or busy) so as to need a crock pot. I'm scared of it because of the cult-like following it has engendered in so many. Go ahead, mention a slow cooker in a a group of 6ish people. There is an 80% that someone will profess their total dependence, undying love, or eternal gratitude to the machine.

Of course, I haven't made anything in said slow cooker yet. I've been busy trying to put more fluids in my body than my body can expel. A competition for which I am ill prepared.

Where were we? Slow cooker. No. Wait. Job. Job! It's not real until my toolbox moves out of the bedroom. I've had too many jobs fall through at this exact point. I don't expect this one to fall through, but I have never expected any of the others either. I have no idea what I expect. I finally let myself look at all of Tyler's student loans, at our prospective budget, and our wishlist of things (a trip to Austria? a newer car?). Turns out, we are probably going to make it. Of course we won't get everything we want. But we at least have the tools to make a life.

There'll be days like this.

"There are good days and there are bad days."

I find things like this scrawled in my sketch books, in the margins of my science notes, and in other much more illogical places. I used to wake up holding crumpled sticky notes with a faint memory of having such an important thought that it could not wait until morning because, well, what if I let go of such a revelation? I used to wake up with nonsense smeared across my hands because I wrote ...something... on my skin, in the dark, in a fit of desperate trying to remember what it feels like to wonder in the dark at a universe so much bigger but not quite threatening.

Always, when I find them later, I am disappointed by my own simplicity. If I do not keep a careful eye upon  myself, I find the most basic ideas to be revolutionary. I am not just easily amused, I am easily motivated... and just as easily lost.

These fragments

These fragments genuinely console me when I find them, before the disappointment and the intellectualism kick in. There are good days and there are bad days.

I have to remember that sometimes.

Those bad days can be so shocking that I forget that I ever had a good day. Those bad days can come in swarms so thick that I forget that they had a beginning. Those bad days can last so long that I forget what it feels like not to be... heavy.

But those good days...

Those good days can end so abruptly that I wonder at their truth. Those good days can get so comfortable that I forget I am being allowed to rest and will be expected to leave. Those good days can restore so much that I forget what I was taught in the dark and broken places.

There are bad days and there are good days and it is no small thing to hold onto both.