If you follow me on instagram you know that I spend a lot of my downtime making miniatures, automata or putting together ridiculous wooden kits, so last night when I started making this small puzzle box kit (filled with wooden gears that would open each side) I expected that I’d be done in an hour but the weather had swollen the wood and exacerbated my rheumatoid arthritis and I couldn’t get the gears to work and nothing would fit and suddenly it was 2am and I was sitting with a box that wouldn’t even close and I considered driving over the whole thing with my car but then I was like, “Fuck it” and I ripped out all the tiny pieces I’d been struggling with for the last four hours and just held the outsides of the box together with rubber bands and squirted elmer’s glue inside of it so it would stay together, and I felt a little bad because it was supposed to be a dice box that I was going to give to Hailey and now it’s a box that you literally can’t even open that I spent 4 hours on. But then this morning I saw it with fresh eyes on the kitchen table and I realized that it’s not empty at all because technically it’s a box filled with all of my mistakes and it is a very good reminder that it’s totally okay to fuck up because most people will just see a perfectly acceptable outside and have no clue how different it was supposed to turn out. And then I thought that I’d give it to Hailey and tell them that it’s a display to put their dice on top of and I felt very good and like I’d grown as a person, and that pride lasted just as long as it took for me to realiz I’d glued the box to the kitchen table, and now I need another day to figure out how to spin this new mistake into a life lesson other than “Don’t pour a bunch of glue into a box filled with holes, you dummy” because it feels like I probably should have known that one already.
