Today’s post is brought to you by Night Verses’ “Glitching Prisms,” which I stumbled across this morning as I tumbled down a rabbit hole.

We’re closing out spring break here in Central Michigan, and the past few days have been a little rocky. I had one of my bouts of typewriter vision just yesterday (it’s like the room is spinning, but it keeps resetting and starting back from the initial point of the spin), and I also had a double-rejection Friday as well. This follows on the heels of a dentist appointment and some scheduling lapses on my part that kept me from attending my first yoga class this week. These Wandlessian travails were amplified by the woes of my lovely fiancee, who has worked heroically all week to get herself set up to thrive this spring but kept encountering reversal after reversal.

The catch, of course, is that she didn’t exactly see it that way, which I’ve found instructive, and which spurred me to think about my own stress in a different way. The most vivid example is probably The Laser, which is pivotal because my fiancee works with a laser cutter/engraver most days. Her ambition down the road is to work primarily with ADA signage, but until she’s eligible to be a rider on governmental contracts (as contractors normally postpone hiring folks, no matter how attractive their bids and how extensive their know-how, until they’ve been in the industry for two years) she’s been using her machines for other projects. My boo, she has all that hustle.

Early in the week she spent several days aligning the optics on her machine, as she hoped it would allow her to achieve higher speeds and greater power, but at day’s end she decided to invest in a new laser tube. The scrambling to get everything sorted was of course stressful, but she was able to round her way back to an optimistic philosophical position in a matter of hours. Doing all the alignment work was not wasted, as it’s work her business will benefit from in the long run, and today she went in to the office excited to see what her newly punchy laser will be able to do at full speed. She also had foresight enough to save for the replacement, so the only real cost was a bit of time. Along the way she’s kept getting calls, including a nibble from one of the biggest contractors in the state. The wheels continue to turn for her, and that turning is aided and abetted by her ability to keep reorienting her own way of seeing in a mature and hopeful way.

In retrospect, was the past week really an Ordeal? Reader, it was not. I’ve cleared out all the items in my grading queue, for example, and I finished drafting my submission for the anthology I mentioned last time around with plenty of room to move in the revisions I attempt. Additionally, I had distinguished presses in mind for the next submissions for both of yesterday’s rejections, and this week I also read Susanna Clarke’s excellent Piranesi, which should fit perfectly into a recent sequence in my graduate class. I have great friends to play games with and great colleagues to work with, and the typewriter vision did not bog me down, as it sometimes does when I’m feeling overwhelmed and just want to take a series of interlocking naps.

I shan’t indulge on the political too much, but it’s an experience rather like the State of the Union address. I wasn’t much inclined to watch the speech on the whole, but I knew my news feed would be dominated by coverage the morning after. And from what I could tell the material was very much reflective of glitches in vision. Overall reviews tended in roughly the same direction (though the take on that direction hinged on who was offering the coverage), but plenty of people were totally fixated on about fifteen total seconds in a talk that lasted more than an hour. It’s rather like walking through an orchard and obsessing over one bruised, worm-riddled apple. It’s part of the picture, not the whole of it.

Not the freshest insight under the sun, I know, but when I run into something heartening I’d rather focus on it than dwell on the stressors that are always at hand. I also wanted to kick out an entry before embarking on this, what seems like my first uncommitted writing afternoon in 46 million years.