The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

This has been one of my best weeks ever:

1) I've been offered a job;
2) I got a hundred on an exam (okay, so it was only psych);
3) I saw Brian Wilson on his last Pet Sounds tour; and
4) Manny Pacquiao KO'd Erik Morales just under 3 minutes into round 3.

This scares me. I feel like I don't deserve all of this, like I'm getting away with something, like all this is going to be followed by some personal disaster in order to right this injustice. If it's anything like before, something will happen to my car, and it just so happens that I'm taking it to my mechanic next week for some regular work and maybe he's going to tell me something's wrong with it.

Or maybe all this good fortune is a follow-up to some bad luck I had earlier this week. We decided to upgrade all our old, inefficient toilets at home. On Tuesday, a plumber came in to do the work. At 2:30 the next morning my mom woke me up because the valve between the tank and the pipes had just popped off and water was flooding the bathroom. I raced to the basement to shut the water off, but the damage had been done: water was leaking from the bathroom upstairs through the ceiling of the ground floor. We were quick and lucky so little damage was wrought. Still, it was a horrible night for us.

The thing about happiness is that the higher you get, the lower the lows seem. I wish we didn't have to worry about that. I wish we had just highs, no lows. Whenever I'm sad I always wish that bad things never happen to anyone, especially me. But when I'm happy I think to myself that without the bad to contrast the good with, then the good would just be mundane and we wouldn't really be happy about anything.

I guess my being nervous about all the good fortune that's befallen me recently proves that I'm learning that something bad's always going to be just around the corner, and I'm no longer naively optimistic to believe that we need bad things in our lives. Jesus, I wish everyone had it all good anyway.