Today there was a disconnect. The cognitive dissonance to end all cognitive dissonances. More of a cognitive cacaphony, really... a sort of aleatoric nightmare symphony of 1,000 transistor radios turned to satellite stations from around the globe.
I am having a great day, though all of the events and portents I have experienced suggest that I should not. I woke up late and did not realize it so that after I showered, I had 10 minutes to get to work. It took 30. I did not care.
Before leaving the house, I noticed my cat had peed on my clean laundry. "Silly kitty," I thought as I smiled and patted her head.
The woman training me to catalog scores showed me a record I had made and was particularly proud of. The piece was called "Don't Let That Horse". The black ink in which my record had printed was drowning in a turgid sea of red pencil markings detailing why this was the worst job I had ever done.
Lunch was dank. Yes, dank. Don't ask.
I was having a crappy day... and I was in a great mood.
OCLC was down, rendering my job impossible to perform. (For the uninitiated, OCLC is a lot of things to us librarians, but for the purposes of this essay, it is the thing I use to search for, create, and edit catalog records.) I couldn't even search the database to pull up a record. Nevertheless, I sat there obsessively clicking "Search" like a maniacal Minesweeper junkie, over and over receiving the message
An error has occured with your search. Please try again.
An error has occured with your search. Please try again.
An error has occured with your search. Please try again.
I felt cold in my workplace, the first pangs of professional zombie-ism eeking into my passionate young mind. What am I doing with myself?
An error has occured with your life. You've blown your only shot.
An emotion (the first of the day) started forming in the howling void of my psyche, and yet it was held back from becoming a true thoughtform by that strange, stupid-happy feeling that won't leave.
I left my desk for an early and extended break.
As I entered the same bookstore/cafe I patronize during every break, I thought "I wonder if there is anything to the fact that I work in a library around books all day and the only place I can think of to go on break is a bookstore (filled with books) whose window presents a spectacular view of... my library. Am I doomed? This feels doomy."
As if in response, the bakery case went dark, the flourescent light extinguished in an undeniable message regarding the state of me. And I just smiled, bemused at the sign that something horrible is about to happen, a nagging feeling I have always nursed no matter how satisfied I feel.
The darkness in that display case spoke to me in a hollow voice: "You're a 9-to-5er. You're going to lose your soul. Look at your crappy day. Every day is going to be like this until your skin turns grey and you lose your free will. OooOOoooOoooOOh!" Basically, my fear of becoming bored and boring was sneaking up again.
And yet I felt right as rain! Inexplicable! Why am I not in a mood? Why don't I feel the way my crappy morning should make me feel? Am I already so detached? No... contentment is not a detached emotion because... well, it's an emotion.
That's when I realized that my strange happiness today was not inexplicable, detached, or otherwise faux or alien or any of the various words I had thought of for it. Bad things happening, forboding thought surfacing... I wasn't happy because I was detached. In fact, the reason I am happy (perpetually happy, even) is because these things happen. These's a subtle distinction here that I'm having trouble articulating.
I realized the day was regular. Bad things happen to me all the time. Every day, I have a million things I can complaing about, and today was like any other. I was just super aware of it for some reason.
I'm not happy because I ignore these things or just don't feel them. I am happy because I can ignore these things though I'm aware of them. Get it? Every unpleasant experience in my life is another chance to say "Ha! Look how everything sucks and I can remain unaffected in the grander sense." It's a decisiveness that's key here... a decisiveness that had become second nature, though I not remember the days when it wasn't. I specifically remember making the turnaround when I was 14 or 15. It gave me a feeling of control over my life, which was both comforting and empowering.
There ended the disconnect. The radios were all tuned to the same station. I was ready to return to work, and OCLC (the client for which is appropriately called Connexion) would probably be working, ready to let me finish my work day smoothly and stress free, though honestly, I kind of hoped that it wouldn't.
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