The Last Word On Nothing

My husband had surgery and complications and is recovering slowly, entailing a lot of medical appointments and difficult information and difficult decisions and long absences from home and office.  Home and office have taken advantage of this to do bad things.  You might think this increase in badness is due to psychology or coincidence; it’s not.  It’s exactly what physics, in my radically new interpretation of it, says should happen.  But first, a representative sample:

The iron blew up — a click, a little white flash, no more heat — so I ordered a new one and did the ironing later.

The amplifier declined to turn on, sat there black and silent.  I didn’t even call the stereo guys.

I lost a dental crown to a plate of soft pasta.  I did call the dentist.

I watched the hospital housecleaner mop the floor,  decided I needed something on the other side of the room, strode across the floor, slipped, and didn’t fall but caught myself.  I didn’t exactly hear something pop but it sure hurt.  The room was full of various hospital personnel required to notify management immediately of a fall.  A kind woman in a white coat told me they were sorry but they had to call code on me.  Code means to me, life and death emergency, all hands on board; they showed up in fast-moving, alert-looking crowd. A code doctor poked my butt and asked where it hurt and said I was probably ok but to be sure I should go to the ER.  No fucking way, hours and hours, CT scans, jeez no.  Ok, she said.  It’s going to take weeks to clear up.  She was right.

I made coffee.  It was lukewarm and an abomination.  That coffee pot has to go, I thought; I never liked it anyway.  Do I go back to the store where I bought it? do I order it online? ordering online always takes so much time, what with a million choices and no real guidance.  Somewhere in these ponderings I remembered that I hadn’t emptied out the coffee pot from yesterday morning, so the new hot coffee got added to the old cold coffee.  I threw it all out.

I tripped on a decorative garden border and again, didn’t fall but caught myself and felt the other side of my back go out.  I spend my evenings sitting on a heating pad.  It sort of helps.

My hard drive blew up.  I was on the computer taking notes during an interview and a little popup said Oh dear, the hard drive might have the blind staggers. I was busy, I ignored it.  Interview over, I assumed the computer had meant what it said, called tech support, and somewhere in there, the computer died, aaaack thud. Tech support sweetly handed me over to sales, which sweetly ordered me a new computer and told me to remove the old hard drive and take it, along with the new computer, to a computer place that would transfer the contents of the old drive to the new computer.  No way I have the  time to do that, let alone the back necessary to lift the new computer. I called the nearest computer place and they can send someone out a week later.  Fine.  Meanwhile my laptop stopped doing updates and the printer jammed forever.

Enough already — lists of bad things get boring. I know some of this was entirely my fault but my brain has become just another untrustworthy appliance.  Anyway, it turns out that concatentations of bad things are decreed by nature, a case of what physics calls quantum entanglement.  In quantum theory, an atom can become entangled with another atom, even when — mark this — the two are nowhere near each other.  They’re sort of locked together, and if one spins one direction, its entangled partner halfway across the universe will also spin the same direction.  Physicists have been testing this for years and weird as it is, it’s more or less experimental reality.

My discovery here is that quantum entanglement also governs life.  Whatever quantum weirdness (a real term) creates the entanglement also operates when my husband has bad things.  Then it reaches across town and entangles my computer, iron, amplifier, printer, tooth, my brain.  I know this is theory but it doesn’t need further testing. I’ve already done the experiment.  Physics will be amazed.

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photo by holdit, via Flickr