I Can Guess That In Two Notes!

I got one of those Hallmark cards that play music for my recent 32d birthday. It plays "Super Freak" by Rick James. Abby Jane has lately taken to playing "Name That Tune" with it -- she opens it long enough to listen to a few words (during which time you are supposed to sing and/or dance), and then snaps it shut (at which point you are supposed to act shocked and make a face). As if the game weren't great enough as it is, this little girl jamming out to Super Freak is truly hilarious. Thanks for the card, LL!

I should add, however, that sometimes when she opens the card, and I start singing, she just shakes her head and looks at me with such a dour expression. If she could, she would say, "Really, Mother. Have you no dignity remaining?"

WHY Do I Watch Hockey??

I watch hockey because:

1. No other sport can match the excitement or intensity of hockey, especially come playoff time.
2. It's played by the greatest athletes in the world....players who can skate up to 30 mph on a quarter inch of steel using a 5 foot long stick to handle a frozen rubber disk which they shoot at 100mph, all while 9 other players on the ice are trying to knock the @$#! out of them.
3. Hockey is the most team-oriented sport of all the major sports. It's 6 guys on the ice all sacrificing personal goals to work towards the betterment of the team.
4. No other sport can match a hockey player's willingness to sacrifice his personal wellbeing to win a game for the team....think Bobby Baun breaking his ankle in game 6 of the Stanley Cup finals but still managing to score the OT winner to force game 7, then playing game 7 on that same broken ankle....only to miss the post-game celebrations b/c he was in the emergency room having his ankle fixed. Injuries are simply an incovenience.
5. There's no joy in winning without the risk of heartbreak from losing.
6. Plus, hockey players are pretty cute, as long as they have most of their teeth. :)

--Adapted from my friend Dan (I don't know whether he thinks hockey players are cute). I asked him why I was putting myself through the pain and agony of being down 2-0 in our second-round playoff series with the Capitals. I guess he's right.

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Fear and anxiety can be good things. They can make you look both ways before you cross the street. They can fuel a desire to take care what you put on your kids' dinner plates or whether you lie in the sun. Out of fear you might decide to follow your instincts and avoid the stranger in the parking lot at night or forego bungee jumping from a sketchy-looking apparatus.

Fear and anxiety can also teach you about yourself, though. The experience of anxiety often forces me to examine the rationality of my thought processes. Is it rational to think that Abby might suddenly stop breathing in her sleep? No, probably not. It is rational to think that if she runs pell-mell across the patio in her Crocs she might fall down and abrade something or other? I think so.

Is it rational to fear a pandemic of swine flu? I don't think so -- exactly. I've decided that my reaction isn't going to be fear. It's going to be calm (at least, calm for me) preparation. If it comes down to it, I've got Tamiflu and I've got masks. I keep up on the news and check the WHO and CDC web sites without obsessing or losing sleep over it. I know that pandemics can spread very quickly, so I check more than once a day. I also realize that the government will be engaged in a balancing act between wanting to inform us and wanting to make sure nobody panics, so for myself I engage in a balancing act between being dutiful and succumbing to conspiracy-theory tendencies born of many years of watching apocalyptic movies. It's made a bit easier, somehow, by the clear statements from world health officials that if this flu becomes extremely contagious, it's too late to contain its spread -- all we can do is try to mitigate it. Okay. I can work with that. Preventive measures to try to keep everyone healthy. Tamiflu if they get sick.

In short, I think I'm handling this threat better than I might have in the past. Rationally. Intelligent consumption of media and government information, with just a soupcon of terror. Not so bad.

I promise, a happier topic next time.