I was walking home, composing this post in my mind. It was going to be deep, eloquent, and more than a little emo. In fact, I was going to talk about peaches. I bought peaches at the grocery store a week ago, but they were rock hard. Over the past couple days they’ve ripened, and now they’re perfect.

It’s a metaphor, you see. I take the boards tomorrow.

Anyhow, here I was thinking about peaches and how very Zen with the world I was. This is the kind of peace the Dalai Lama feels on a daily basis. I got in, shucked my shoes, threw down my wallet, keys, phone, and backpack, and walked out to go get my mail.

The lock clicked behind me.

How exactly do you lock yourself out of your house – for the first time in your life – the night before the boards?

The enormity of the problem soon hit me. You have to prove your identity to take the USMLE – I had no wallet. You also have to get to the testing center. Walking shoe-less through the barren desert is not exactly conducive to test-taking.

What would you do? The night before the hardest test of your life (literally, ever, in your whole life, ever). Remember, you’ve studied 12 hours a day, 6 days a week, for 6 weeks. Would you cry? Run around the street naked like a madman? Would you quietly go insane, babbling to yourself “so close, so close…” while rocking back and forth in a corner?

I’m proud to report that I kept my cool. In fact, all I did was chuckle and say “typical”.

I should mention at this point that my house has steel bars on all of the windows to deter theft (of what, my debt?). TJ and I also lost the extra set of keys we hid outside last year.

And then the most wonderful of things happened. As I walked around to the back of the house, I saw that the latch on my window’s security bars had rusted off. My window, the kind that swings outwards, was slightly ajar, as the handle had fallen off a few weeks ago. The screen’s been busted ever since I moved in.

I swung the security bars open, pulled the window out, tipped the screen onto my desk, and broke into my own house.

Fuck peaches. A peach ripening isn’t a sign. Locking yourself out of your house, and then having all the stars align in glorious union so you can get back in… that’s a sign.

I am going to kick ASS tomorrow.