Glass and Irony

Weird experience of the day: My roommate CJ and I go home teaching after church. The girls we home teach are sitting on the couch, and we pull up a couple chair and sit across from them. Before we start the lesson, one of the girls jokes about how it feels like a teacher-student setup, so I move my chair off to the side a little while CJ offers to sit cross-legged on the floor. We have a good laugh and go on with the lesson.

When we're done, CJ asks the usual question, "Is there anything at all we can do for you?" They say, "No." Just at that moment, their light fixture falls out of their ceiling and shatters to pieces in the exact spot where I'd been sitting at the beginning of the lesson. This light fixture is not the paper-thin kind we have at my apartment; it's shaped like a punchbowl and is at least a quarter of an inch thick--and unlike my light fixture, this one seems like it had my name on it.

When the shock has worn off (as you can imagine, none of us really saw that coming) we clean up the shattered glass and try to figure out what went wrong. The glass is hot enough to burn skin and there's an faintly acrid smell in the air, like something has melted. We don't figure out what made the light fixture fall, but we decide it's pretty ironic that we ended up with something we could do to help our home teachees.