Month: December 2006

Buick Versus Deer

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Well, if 2006 wasn’t a bad enough year for me already! Seems fate had one last card to play and it came Saturday, (December 16), when on my way back from Mankato on Highway 14, a huge buck jumps out of the center highway divider and slams head first into the driver’s side of my Buick LeSabre. Needless to say, the deer wrecked the entire side of the car. I can’t even open the driver’s side door now. Luckily, it hit the side of the car and not the front or else it could have slammed right through the windshield.

All I saw was some fur in front of the side mirror and the next thing I knew there were pieces of my car flying out. I didn’t slow down at all until about five minutes later, so as not to crash into anyone else. I eventually pulled over to the side of the road and finished tearing some of the dangling pieces of plastic from the front tire well. Then we drove to the nearest town and duck-taped the turn signal light. Katryn called the local police and they came and looked at the car and I had to get an accident report. I then had to drive about 280 miles home to Iowa from Minnesota.

From what the insurance company told us so far, the car is pretty much totaled, since the repairs cost more than the value of the car. I keep going over the accident, but I can’t think of anyway I could have avoided the deer. It was totally dark already by 5 PM, and since it blindsided me by jumping from the center divider which was pretty much a wide ditch, it was very hard for me to see.

Holiday Stress

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As a kid, The Holidays rocked. It was a time to kick back and stay home from school. As an adult The Holidays became a stressful time when you find yourself doing things you literally hate doing. All of a sudden you find yourself in stores you never go into, waiting in line to buy something you would never buy yourself, and the routine schedule that you keep to, is totally off track as you try to fit in family parties, shopping, gift wrapping, and through it all you start stressing out over your weight, your relatives getting along, and then it finally hits you: The Holidays suck! About the only real joyful moment I had last holiday season was watching my youngest son gorge himself in presents. He was so excited, I thought he’d pass out from sheer joy. This year, I’m really thinking The Grinch might have the right idea after all. The Holidays really are for kids.

I was looking through some of my old writings, when I stumbled upon this little rant, that I wrote back in 2004:

Relationships Suck During the Holidays

Men often have the luxury of not thinking about lots of stuff. We worry about ourselves most of the time, and that is just great, but around the holidays we lose this luxury. For some unknown reason the holidays bring out this idea that peace and goodwill are a good thing and that we should be polite and forgiving of others. Now this is all nice and dandy, when you are talking about say dueling nations or strangers you don’t really know all that well, but for your significant other to suggest this about your family is just ludicrous. It is prone to failure each and every year. This is why the holidays are so stressful, it is not that there is something magical about this time of year, nope, it’s that your girlfriend or most likely your wife decides for you that you must forgive everything about your relatives and just pretend that everything is civil and that they are perfectly normal people and that you are totally fine with everything. In other words, suppress, suppress, suppress everything and drink your eggnog.

And sure it works, this plan of women to make the world peaceful for just the holidays, that is until you just can’t take it anymore and you curse out your brother, your sister-in-law, your father, or whoever it is you just can’t get along with at the dinner table. Five minutes after you’ve stormed out or made someone cry, or worse spill their eggnog, you realize just what a dumb ass you are and that you didn’t solve anything by screaming your feelings out like that. But it is too late, you’ve ruined another holiday reunion and everyone knew you had to do it too. Suddenly you are the reason why everyone tries to be polite and all peace-loving around the holidays, you just realized that you are the problem, and not your uncle who cheats on his wife, or your crazy mother-in-law who is secretly plotting to take revenge since you married her daughter. That’s right, it’s all YOU!

But wait, you can still blame your girlfriend/wife. If she had not screamed at you to be all civil and happy-smiling during the holidays, maybe, just maybe you would not have exploded. Maybe she was plotting against you all along, to make you be the fallguy this year, so she would not be the one to be the problem one! But all of this is too late you have ruined the holidays and the eggnog is now smelling kind of funny.

There is always next year, when you’ll try to remember to be yourself for the holidays instead of trying to be all merry and polite. Maybe just maybe next year you won’t ruin the holidays and you won’t have to drink this bad eggnog.

Turning Thirty-four

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This morning I checked my email and saw that my brother emailed me, asking me how I felt about being in my mid-thirties? I honestly did not think of it until he said that, partly because I’ve been telling everyone I’m 29 for the last three years. However, I am now officially thirty-four and thinking, well it is not too bad. I enjoy things more, and I’ve learned to have more patience in general. Although I’d like to think it is because I’ve matured and learned the ways of The Force, but sometimes it is that the reflexes have slowed down over the years. It is not that my rebellious instincts have at all subsided, it is that mentally you no longer welcome the consequences. I guess when you are young and oblivious to such things as consequences your bravado will push you further than you really wanted to go, but with age comes the wisdom of knowing that when you engage yourself in a fight, most likely you will not come out unscathed. Nowadays I know to pick my battles wisely, as I know most wars can never be won. And even more importantly I understand how there are people that love to instigate wars that they never fight themselves. Life is about choices and experiences. Most often it comes to a crossroads between the arduous moral choice and the easier way out. Everyone likes to say how they always choose the right way, but in reality, most often we pick the easy way out because choosing the moral path is just too hard. Then there are times, when you have learned from past experience that the moral path does not exactly end with cheering applause, more often than not, people resent you even for making the right choices. Undeniably age does become a factor, but it isn’t so much that you can’t react like you use to, it is that you have learned from your past experiences.