Karma

Do you believe in karma?

And I don’t mean religiously

I think I believe in karma, at least at its essence

I could cook up some pseudoscientific explanation right now;

About how on a quantum level fundamental particles spontaneously come to existence—

birthed at the same time as their corresponding antiparticles to maintain balance;

About how the rules of physics dictate that universe loves to maintain this dynamic equilibrium 

And so every bit of fortune and/or indulgence

Must come with its eventual spell of bad luck 

Or vice versa,

As I more commonly like to think

But there’s really no basis to my belief

Except for times like this

***

My sister is on her middle school volleyball team. And honestly, as much as I won’t admit it in front of her, she’s pretty good. When she first signed up for tryouts, I convinced our dad to buy her a volleyball.

 

We don’t live in a big house, and that house does not have a finished basement, so when I would practice with my sister, we would hit the ball back and forth between the office room and the main entrance, (like about 7ish feet apart) (see figure 1).

figure 2

figure 1

I’d toss the ball to her. 

She’d try to hit it back. 

I’d volley. 

Sometimes I would annoy her by holding the ball and trying to spin it on my finger (I’ve gotten decent at that, the spinning part at least. Annoying her is pretty easy). 

It was a nice break from us constantly being at each others' throats. 

But of course all good things must come to an end. 

On Thursday (3/2) we were practicing and (probably because she got mad at me cause I’m better than her) my sister chucked the ball towards my face (but missed cause she totally sucks) and gave the Chinese Money Plant a haircut and decapitated the Red Moon Cactus that my mom had been nurturing for over a year, creating a muddy fallout speckled over the tan carpeting. 

My sister still has a lot to learn in the art of getting away with things. While I was crumpling up some toilet paper to layer on top of the leaves I hid in bathroom trash can, she accidentally bumped into the broomstick in the mud room while trying to get the dustpan, smacking it on the hard tile and immediately alerting my parents to her crime—hence incriminating the both of us, cause apparently abetting a crime makes you just as guilty as the perpetrator in the eyes of the law. 

So my mom was understandably mad, but luckily we cleaned everything up and got off on parole with our respective sentences being reduced. My sister had her charges dropped and was let off with a warning and I put myself on voluntary volleyball probation. No harm, no foul right?

Well fast forward to the next day. I watched her home game against Avondale and even though her team lost, she played pretty well and got some kind of MVP award (pretty easy to be the MVP when everyone else on the team is like a below-average to a atraight up LVP). 

When we got back from home though, I had gotten mad at her for something she said, and honestly at this point it doesn’t even matter, but I said some things I shouldn’t have.

I might have mentioned something along the lines of how stupid her big-ass wireless headphones looked on her active volcano-looking ass five-head and how ass both her and her friends were at volleyball cause their overconfident-asses got their asses handed to them by some ass Rochester school and how my parents were blaming me for her being a dumb-ass and not studying for her easy-ass math test out and how she was such a pain in the ass to deal with sometimes. 

Needless to say, tensions were a bit high that night, and so that combined with my temporary volleyball temperance led to her volleying by herself by hitting the ball up the main staircase (see figure 2) while listening to whatever 13 year old girls listen to using Youtube.com on their school iPads on their comically oversized headphones.

It’s like 10 or something and my parents are still eating while I’m sitting on the couch in the little office room pretending to finish up school work like I usually before I go to bed.

where it used to be

Picture that fell from the main staircase,
still not reframed yet.

Out of nowhere, I hear a series of descending thuds followed by a sharp shatter. My sister sort of freezes for a second before letting out some kind of noise that can only be described as the braying of a (stupid ass) donkey. Shards and splinters are all over the tile floor and even the carpet: both in the office room and on the main staircase. 

Of course it wasn’t long before I could hear the clapping of both my parents’ sandals on the tile as they stormed over from the kitchen to the hallway. I was not going to bed on time that day even if I wanted to. They tossed me my sandals but told me not to move anyway. My sister got out the vacuum from the basement and the dust pan from the mud-room (where they still were after she had put them back yesterday) and got to work toiling under my feet. It took a lot of self-restraint to not just laugh in her face, which this time no longer half covered by her headphones (revealing her full six-head in all its Pompeiian glory) because she was grounded from using both them and her iPad.

What else can you do in a time like that

But laugh.

Of course over the next few days I made sure to sprinkle in some crystalline puns into our conversations, particularly when we were just out of view of my parents so that I could speed-walk into the room they were in so they could witness the unjust assault that was taking place against a poor, innocent soul before their very eyes (pretty sure it’s not perjury if it’s against your sibling).

Of course I took the next opportunity that I could to tell our grandparents about this whole ordeal when they called, emphasizing how even though my parents told her to just play in the basement on Thursday after she broke those plants, she still decided to play upstairs and broke something else the very next day.

To top it all off, my sister did start playing in the basement after all this, but she must have hit the sump pump pipe and caused it to loosen because I woke up to the sound of water flooding our basement on Sunday morning before I went to work.

Situational irony sure is ironic.

***

It's next week (3/9) and I’m in Orgo. The school’s power went out yesterday, and it hasn’t come back to Mrs. Robles’ room. We’re about a day behind because of the outage, so we’re making up the cherry coke distillation that we were supposed to do the day before. Coincidentally, yearbook's in the room to take pictures of us doing science-y stuff. 4th hour already had everything set up, so I removed the round bottom flask from the distillation apparatus and emptied it out.

After getting it refilled, I plug the top of the flask back into the stopper and let go of it for a second to try to move the ring stand back underneath.

Its important to note that this stopper was made of glass (which probably has a lower coefficient of static friction than the usual rubber ones we're used to), and the round bottom flask was full of liquid (thereby increasing the normal force exerted between the flask and the stopper and overcoming the static friction threshold), so the kinematics weren’t exactly in my favor. But clearly I didn't get the memo. 

Honestly, I still don’t get how the flask shattered into a million pieces given that it was only like 2 inches off of the table. And of course, it had to be the size of flask that we didn’t have any extra of, so now my group was pretty much sanctioned from doing the lab in addition to having to clean up the carnage.

All that's still fine, its just an accident, plus we essentially got a free lab grade since we couldn't do the informal write-up anymore. As we're beginning to clean up, Mrs. Robles mentions some thing about me being the "first person to break...(?)". I had no idea what she said, but somehow it merged with the other thing she said about how she was "planning to make a poster to go along with 'The Bin Of Shame' with pictures of people standing next to their broken glass, and how I was going to be the first one on that poster".

So it all overrode itself in my head and what I heard was that I was the first person to have broken glass in her room, so when she told me to take down her 'Bin of Shame', I reasonably assumed it was empty. So when I jumped up to grab it from on top of the storage cabinets, I didn't expect it to have the weight of like 10 years worth of Troy High's Organic Chemistry's shattered history. My grip faltered, and I got a nice crystal shower.

Piece of glass that
probably went from
my clothes to the staircase

The glass was everywhere. Not just in my hair, on my face, in my shirt, pants, or jacket, but also like everywhere. There were people three lab tables away with glass on their station, and the worst part was that we couldn't even see where half of the glass really was because all the lights were off. Apparently the crash was so loud that Mr. Glynn heard it from halfway down the hallway, and so did half the rest of the science department because random teachers were popping in the rest of the hour to make sure a bomb didn't go off in there or something. I got a flattering portrait of me holding the Bin of Shame with glass in my hair and all around me that might make it into the yearbook, so stay tuned for that I guess, and now I stay away from glass instrument's like the plague (at least temporarily).

To end off the rest of that day, I got elbowed by someone when I stood up at my bus stop and almost had my glasses knocked off my face. It hurts to blink a bit on my right side.

What else can you do in a time like this

But laugh.

.

***

Ever since swimming ended
I’ve had a lot of energy
I’ve had some highs and some lows

But I guess I’m fine with some things going bad right now
That’s ok
It’s fine
I know I have a lot of big things coming up soon
A lot of things that require a lot of luck
So I’m just stockpiling, just storing up

That’s my comfort, my faith in karma.