Melancholy

Saturday

I probably could have been more concerned about my well-being. I can honestly say that at no point in planning any of this did I ever really consider the gravity of the risk I was taking. By the time that I was making my plans to take part in these tests, the technology and the mechanics had become such a routine and thoroughly explored concept in my life that I had lost any apprehension I may have been afforded by novelty. I was effectively a frog in a pot. My husband, Emil, on the other hand, was not a man of science and he had no problem seeing the risks for what they were. We sat on the veranda on a spring afternoon; I was lounging with some trashy gossip magazine I had picked up in a grocery store checkout lane, wearing my least flattering gardening clothes with no shoes. Emil was focused intently on his phone, dressed in a similarly casual manner and doing whatever it is he does with his phone when he's idly wasting time. At that moment, the latest rumors about celebrity couples had an infinitely more priority in my mind than anything relevant to my career or professional life. It was only in the interest of making some sort of conversation with my husband that I mentioned my plans for the week to him in the most casual of manner.

"We're going to try our system out on Monday," I said with the same level of concern I might give to telling him my plans to go grocery shopping.

"Oh? With who?" He replied, with a perturbed edge that was just past the threshold of noticeability.

"Me, Nolan, and Rico," I offered. "It's kind of an occasion since this is a pretty novel thing we built, so the three of us get first dibs."

Emil frowned and set his phone down on a table next to his chair. I could see the cogs moving in his head. We have been together for nearly ten years, having met at school while we were both doing our undergrads. When Emil is bothered by something he almost immediately goes silent and begins working through the issues on his own, as if he doesn't really want to risk upsetting me or sparking an argument until he's deeply considered some number of variables that I never really get to weigh in on. I never really saw the point, I've never been one to argue with him or get angry about many things, but he has his own approach to conversation so I let him have it.

After a drawn out minute of silence, Emil re-enters the conversation.

"You seem kind of nonchalant about hooking yourself up to that thing," Emil finally countered. "I didn't know you were ever planning on actually using it yourself."

"I mean, I built the fuckin' thing. I'm pretty much hinging my career on this kind of work, it seems like I should at least understand the experience, you know?" I reply, adding casual obscenity to my response in an attempt to bring levity to the conversation.

This brings us back to where we started: I am a frog in a pot. Nothing about this technology is new to me. I touch these machines every day. I talk to assistants about the code every day. My life is an endless, tedious string of meetings about safety and QA and failsafes and risk mitigation. We really could have been doing real world tests of this system years ago, it's just that there is a considerable amount of preparation and planning that needed to be done before we met a responsible level of rigor in our planning that everybody would be comfortable with. What Emil doesn't understand is that this preparation and planning has been done, and so I am comfortable. And, once again, I fuckin' built the thing, so I know the whole thing back to front - warts and all. If I'm comfortable with it, it's probably pretty safe.

"What if you end up a vegetable? What if you go into there on Monday, that thing fries your brain, and I'm left picking up the pieces of our life?" Emil asks his voice beginning to raise slightly with agitation. "How could you wait until two days before you did this before telling me that this is something I need to be worried about?"