Both of these things, foreshadowing and Irony, are popular literary devices used to drive a story forward and create interest sometimes even without the reader’s awareness.
Okay, maybe he’s talking about metaphor but you get the gist.
While I appreciate irony and foreshadowing in my literature, I’ve come to realize they’re not quite as cool when they occur in real life. For example, last week my son tripped over my laptop’s charging cord pulling the device to the edge of the table. It almost fell, my laptop, which surely would have resulted in it breaking. I pointed that out along with my great relief that this hadn’t actually happened.
A few days later, at the end of that same week, I made a sharp turn as I was driving home from school and my backpack plunged into the car’s dashboard. Actually this happened twice on my way home. Twice my backpack fell forward and slammed into the dash. That evening my daughter asked to watch a movie on said laptop. She opened it up to discover a black spot on the screen along with multiple horizontal lines spanning the screen. While I recognized the foreshadowing in this situation, I most certainly did not enjoy it.
The black spot on my laptop screen was sort of like this and I definitely felt cursed.
To add to the not-so literary quality of this tale, during the very same week I got an e-mail saying my device protection warranty was about to expire. I was pretty mad because I knew I had renewed it for the year sometime in the early spring , February at the earliest. Luckily that warning was for my daughter’s tablet. Not so luckily when I took it to the store I found out I had renewed tech support on my laptop last spring, not the drop & break warranty. Much like the situations Alanis Morissette sings about, I’m not sure if that’s irony but it sure is unfortunate.
Just in case you didn’t happen to be a high school girl in the late 1990’s…
Exactly a week after irony laced with foreshadowing reared its unpleasant head I saw that ugly bitch again. (Thursdays and I have a questionable track record.) I was feeling the stress of finals week combined with the kids’ last week of school before break (you know the one with all the concerts and classroom parties, all the expected school Secret Santa drawings and teacher appreciation gifts or treats, that week) and I wrote a post whining about the final for my last class. Maybe you read it, I kind of hope you didn’t. At the end of that post I said I didn’t even want to take my final final of the semester. Well I lied; in reality I did want to take that final. Even though it was optional and I was no where near as prepared as I should’ve been, I definitely wanted the chance to pull my sad sad grade up to a respectable level.
Guess what. That didn’t happen. When I tried to start my car Thursday morning it just didn’t. It appeared that the battery, the one I replaced just this fall (when the alternator kicked the bucket leaving me stranded), was dead. My brother had taken the kids to school that morning ( well, four of them, the other was supposed to go with the neighbors but had missed his ride) so I could get to campus by nine. He was still close by and able to come back and jump the dead van battery. Except it wouldn’t jump. And yes I hooked the cables up correctly. This is not, in fact, my first rodeo. After being on the cables for about ten minutes, the lights flickered a bit but that was all the energy the battery could muster. By that time my brother had to get to work so he took the last kid to school and there I sat, 45 minutes away from the college with a dead car. I waved the white flag and commenced a solid angry mope session. It was a crappy ending to an equally crappy semester. I guess I need to learn to be careful for what I wish for.
Later that evening my neighbor came over to look at my dead van. We tried a couple things before deciding that he would take my battery to his garage and try to charge it. As he was lifting the battery out we heard the subtle click of the electrical system kicking on. I tried starting the car, still nothing. “Move the battery around and I’ll give it another try” I suggested. He did. I did. It started. As the engine turned over I suddenly remembered that I had hit a pot hole so hard a week earlier that all the dashboard lights flashed. Turns out it jarred the battery loose.
I missed my final because of a loose battery terminal. In other words a screw needed tightening. That’s it. Son of a bitch!
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