mistake

conscious + aware
i did a bad thing yesterday. like stupid-bad, not malicious. but bad nonetheless.

i arrived at work at around 9 AM after a lovely workout in our apartment gym. i had signed onto the pager at 8 as always, but amazingly it hadn’t gone off at all by that time! i had my [free 3-month trial of] sirius radio blaring [LOVE the spectrum station!] and was actually singing along on my way into the parking garage.

given my late arrival time, the only spots available were on the 8th floor — the top of the deck, where the sun beats down all day. but all was well! i carefully put my sunshield into place, anticipating a hot commute home in the afternoon. i headed into work in a good mood, still singing [at least in my head].

work
was interesting. my email account was migrated and i had NO access to any of my work emails [still don’t!! definitely a problem!] and there wasn’t much going on, so josh was wonderful enough to pick me up from work. we went out to lunch and may or may not have stopped home to watch the season premier of weeds before he dropped me back in. i ended up getting quite busy at that point — 3 PICU consults in a row — and didn’t even notice this was going on outside.

7 pm
rolls around, i’m done with my consult notes, and i head to the 8th floor of the parking garage to find that THE DRIVER’S SIDE WINDOW WAS COMPLETELY OPEN, and thus the interior of my not-yet-one-month-old-car was soaked. soaked. i had no towels to clean up and therefore just sat in the puddles in my cotton dress, crying all the way home at my error.

to my calculations, i’ve parked in the duke parking garage over 1200 times, and in my memory i have NEVER come back to my car to discover an open window. i also don’t typically park on the exposed 8th floor, and this epic rainstorm was the first sprinkling we’ve had in well over a week.

so.
i arrived home and josh helped me clean up with some towels. it was still raining, so no airing out was possible, but today i plan to leave the windows cracked in hopes of preventing a mold party in my upholstery. apparently, this has happened to people before. but i still feel so bad [and i know josh is distraught]. yes, there are worse things. MUCH worse things! so i’m tempted to just not worry about it too much, but i still feel guilty, even though i did nothing purposefully wrong.

awareness
i suppose it all comes down to awareness of one’s surroundings — something that has never been my strong suit. i’m often too wrapped up in my own thoughts, whether they are joyful [like yesterday morning!], sad, or neutral. sometimes, this feature serves me well — i can study in crowded environments and am not easily distracted. other times, like yesterday . . . not so much.

one problem that i have about all this is that i would love to promise josh that i will never do anything like this again — and yet i don’t know how, in my mind, to say this truthfully. i will certainly TRY my hardest! but how do you ensure that essentially i never do anything in an absent-minded state ever again when there is really very little conscious thought going on once you’ve entered that state!?

if you have any thoughts/advice, i would love to be enlightened. and, if you have any good car-drying or leather-cleaning tips for me, i’m open to those as well.

namaste.

[no pictures today — the uploader isn’t working for some reason! universe conspiring again me? random suckiness? you decide.]