You'll poke your eye out! (with a pineapple)

Last night was short on sleep or dreams.  But something noteworthy did happen today - I poked myself in the eye with a pineapple, which is certainly a personal first.
 
The day did not have a particularly auspicious beginning.  I woke into a rather conventional existential panic: omg i'm not living up to my potential and i'm forty and what is the meaning of life the planet's going to shit and shouldn't i be doing something important or useful instead i'm boring and tired all the time and my iq points are dropping right and left maybe i'm supposed to have kids after all but it's too late and i used to be good at writing but now i don't know if i'm good at anything i'm always afraid my boss will decide i suck at my job and i'll become unemployablee and destitute unable to support even my cats and so die alone ETCETERA)

So I took a breath, gave myself a tough love pep talk and decided the weight of the world's problems and my neuroses could wait for another thirty minutes, since it was 6am and I had not managed to fall asleep till 1am.

The morning got busy with teaching duties, lab experiments, a meeting. At 1136am I was puzzling over data when I suddenly remembered a lunchtime team fitness event I was signed up for.  But it was in less than an hour, on another campus, and I had not brought any sweat-friendly clothes.  

I ran the six blocks to the carpark, hopped on the freeway, thanking several minor deities that off peak traffic in Seattle is not bad at all.  It took only 25 minutes to get from lab door to home.  I grabbed tights, hoodie, tennis shoes, and another frantic freeway interlude later, made it to the Pineapple Express start site with three minutes to spare.

My team of four donned leis and lugged pineapples through four stations dotted across campus, where we faux-swam, climbed stairs, lunged, crunched, and hopped around all in the name of fitness.  And on the very last rep of the very last exercise at the very last station, I bent over and poked myself in the eye with the leafy hairdo of my own pineapple.

It hurts to poke yourself in the eye with sharp foliage.  Naturally I wondered if I had made myself blind, scratched my cornea, given myself an infection with some menacing pineapple bacteria, or was about to discover that -  notwithstanding the fact that I eat pineapple mutliple times a week at the workplace salad bar without incident - I have a previously undetected and very severe allergy to pineapple leaves.

Since I don't trust eyewash stations, I got back in my car and took my reddening eye to Bartell drugs.  Three rinses with Bausch & Lomb Eye Relief and it still hurt but not as much and I managed to talk myself down from imminent blindness and imagined corneal surgeries.  Instead, I went back to work, pausing only for late lunch (pho) and much later a snack (soda machine). 

And work is where you will find me still, looking at worms under the microscope, furrowing my brow over cloning diagrams, and a little bit dreading the pop quiz I have to write for my students' 8am lab tomorrow.  But I have a bottle of saline and a bottle of Gatorade, which is enormous wealth by some standards.  So I should be content.