Grounds for a Lawsuit

When you finish reading this, you'll realize that you just read a really, really bad pun.

In other news, I have worse luck with my eyes than Jaleel White. Some of you may remember late last year when an unfortunate trip home from the beloved Thirsty Ear disasterously ended in a black eye and a fractured foot after I gracefully tripped and fell onto my own fist. Thankfully, people assume most of my injuries are related somehow to hockey (which I haven't even played in three months, partly in fault to my unfortunate limbo accident) and not the usual first inclination to lean toward "abusive boyfriend".

I used to have this computer game was sort of educational but mostly just an excuse to laugh at circus freaks. It was an interactive carnie game of sorts: a sideshow theatre. The best feature of the CD-ROM (remember the last time you got info off of a CD-ROM?) was the bio gallery, where you could read all sorts of personal information on the world's most loved circus freaks (My favorite was JoJo the Dogfaced Boy) that included all sorts of colorful adjectives, mostly describing body hair. The most entertaining part of the bios were the descriptions of the gruesome deaths of said freaks. You'd think that they would have passed on due to complications involving the nature of their respective deformities, however, their deaths were even more freak than they were.

JoJo the Dog-Faced Boy Cause of death: Pneumonia.
Lucia Zarate, Puppet Woman Cause of death: Freezing to death when the train she was on became stalled in the Rocky Mountains during a heavy snowstorm.
Admiral Dot Cause of death: After escaping a hotel fire that burned down an entire city block caused by a stray cigarette butt, Dot survived only to contract the flu, which she died from 7 years later.
Topless Hot Dog Cause of almost death: Espresso machine malfunction/explosion.

You get the pun now?

It was a perfectly nice Sunday evening and, trying to save up some money for a venture I am planning, I decided to save a few bones by making myself a mocha at home. My espresso machine just sits in the kitchen next to its stainless steel counterparts, day after day, looking promising and underutilized and I just decided it was time for an espresso.

With a gay barista-like smile on my face, I basked in the rich aroma of the coffee while I packed it into the instrument through which the coffee is filtered (hey, I said barista-like -- I ain't no barista -- that's a whole other language) and sealed it up onto the machine. I steamed my soy milk and decided it was frothy enough when the metal container onto which I was holding became hot to the touch. I started to get pretty excited about my new syrups I'd just bought to add to my anticipated beverage. I switched over from the 'steam' setting to the 'coffee making' setting and heard the machine start to hum. Black, thick brew began to seep from the machine into my two cleverly placed silver cups. The hum started to turn into a slight rattle, and that slow rattle began to grow so loud I furrowed my brow and decided to look at the machine a little bit closer and harder, as if that could suppress the problem.

What happened next, had it been viewed by someone other than myself, might have been the most unfortunately humorous, yet tragic event ever witnessed.

In one swift, 'POP!' the pressure building up within the machine blew off the holder of the coffee grounds, hitting me in the shoulder before flying across the room, right onto the carpet. The force of the release from the machine was swift and strong, and about four tablespoons of scorching hot coffee grounds blew forth onto my clothes, into my hair, and onto my face and hands. I wanted to laugh, but I sort of felt like I might be on fire. As soon as the initial shock subsided, I realized that the coffee grounds on my face were singeing off my skin rather quickly. I was able to paw most of them off of my face in a hurry, however, I'm left with the sort of face people avoid starting directly into.

It, like the black eye, will probably last for a couple weeks. 

Someone, somewhere is laughing. Not me though, because it hurts my face.

A Lesson From My Dog Trainer

After my few years on this Earth, many of them spent around massive groups of men (through sports, and my various jobs which included sporting goods stores and car dealerships), it's become quite clear to me why men find a lot of women completely psychotic. Because they are. Men clearly have their issues as well, but for some reason women are pathetically more blatant about them. The following applies to both.

Let me let you in on a little bit of insight, called the Law of Expectation. There are several variations of said law, however, the underlying life principle is the same:Model Success. Expect the Best. 

Basically, put yourself in the path of greatness; do not set yourself up for failure. Much like dog trainers will tell you, upon presenting them with a new puppy, do not expect your new dog to understand your commands right away. A new, untrained puppy clearly does not know how to 'come' or to 'sit' immediately; you must be patient and teach your dog how to do these things before you can come to expect them. Moreover, do not ask things of your dog that you know he cannot do, and then scold him for such. This is not following a path of success for either you or your dog.

If there are two things that really turn me off toward a person, they are if that person just seems content being apathetic or drowning themselves in self-pity. Whether this sounds selfish or not, it is true for everyone; we spend our lives trying to enrich ourselves, to learn new things, and to ultimately become better people as we learn and apply the lessons that life allows us to comprehend. There are people that will give you energy, and people that will hungrily take it from you, and I don't feel selfish in feeling certain that the latter group are people that should be consistently avoided. Depending on your personality you may feel a pang of sympathy for these people, and lend your shoulder to listen to them bitch about anything from how much their life isn't going the way they've planned, to how much gas costs 'these days' and how hard it is on them. 

But, face it: our lives are controllable. Gas may not be, however, we're all going through it. There are always people that are worse off than ourselves. Instead of fearfully holding yourself back by not allowing yourself to see the sun shine through your emo clouds, try taking a step forward and getting your head out of your ass. Seriously. It feels better. 

A friend of mine told me of something incredibly hurtful that someone said to her once, awhile ago, that has stuck with her since. My advice to her, was, to say, "Do you feel that way about yourself?" and if the answer is 'no', then realize that you should start asking yourself, "What is wrong with her?" not "What is wrong with me?" You can only be as hurt from someone else's snake tongue that you allow yourself to be. Be confident in who you are.

The fact of the matter is, by feeling bad for despondent people, you are just contributing pity to the self-pitying. You are fueling their miserable fire, and eventually you will find yourself submersed in it. You may feel that you can help, but that is not what they truly want from you. Read between the lines. Back to the dog; your first inclination at his incessant whining is to run to his aid immediately and let him out of his cage so that he will stop crying. What you are doing is disasterous in the long term, since your dog knows that if he whines you will let him out of this cage. You are not contributing to a healthy relationship between you and your dog at this point. Fast forward one year and you're cleaning up piss everyday when you get home from work and spending your weekends putting in laminate flooring to replace the soiled carpet.

Sigh.

So, back to the Law of Expectation. The key to not becoming one of these types of people is to practice effective visualization and apply it to what you know will happen to you every day. We have a general idea of the types of adversities we will face on a day-to-day basis and we can choose to ignore them or choose to confront them. Visualize yourself out of a negative situation. Think about your options, potential outcomes, and then be ready for all of the above. Learn from your mistakes. Personal and professional relationships suffer when people can not learn from or overcome their mistakes. The balance is to remain positive, while being realistic. Amazingly, easier said than done.

See yourself succeeding. I want to punch people when I hear them say self-defeating things like, "It figures," or "I wouldn't have been able to do it anyway". Similarly, I shake my head when I hear people say things to defend the fact that they want every day to remain exactly the same as the one before it. "I'm comfortable here," or "That isn't something I generally do..."

This is your life, and it's ending one day at a time.

Life Through Hockey

The Red Wings play the Edmonton Oilers tonight at 8pm, on some station that I don't have to worry about finding since whatever bar I go to will unquestionably have already found it. To a lot of people, it will be just another game on television that may catch their interest for a second or two in between flipping through other programming. To some it will be interrupting their regular programming and they'll feel a rise of anger when they see that playoff hockey is on NBC instead of whatever retarded game show has people slinging catchphrases in their daily conversations.  Yet, for some people, what happens tonight could seal the next three months into an envelope labeled "Something Else".

We all have things that are dearly important to us, and a lot of people find true love through sports. I surely do. Is it because I understand the game or because I can identify with the players' frustrations as having played myself? Maybe. However, on a deeper level I think it is because I realize that the players that suit up in red and white and take the ice every night are living their dream. They are doing what they told themselves they wanted to do since they were little kids, again through the process of "growing up", and when faced with the opportunity to put forth the amount of work and effort necessary to make it a reality, they stepped up, worked hard and generally won at life. They put themselves out for public consumption, entertainment, and criticism. They are amazing. In turn, I feel a loyalty to that team of individuals, through waivers, retirement, and even trades when it's time to let a player go.

Hockey is an incredibly emotional game. A lot of people who are not fans of the game would probably fail to realize that. 

In June of 1997, in one of the most tragic incidents in hockey history, Vladmir Konstantinov (among others) was in a limosine accident that put him into a coma, and from which he eventually sustained head injury and paralysis. I have never cried with such intense sadness and happiness at the same time, as when he was wheeled onto the ice following the 1998 Detroit Stanley Cup win. My emotion bled through in respect for his courage, what he'd given to the team, and subsequently what his team was able to give back to him.

In 1999, nearly exactly seven years ago from this date, Steve Chaisson (Red Wings defenseman) was killed in a car accident. I grieved as if I had lost a member of my own family. The degree of sympathy I felt for people I'd never met was difficult to interpret, and wasn't anything short of true admiration.

In 2002, when Detroit won the Stanley Cup I, once again, couldn't suppress my emotions. I was ordered multiple sympathy drinks, when they really should have been celebratory.

2004, known infamously as "The Year Without Hockey" was one of the worst years in my personal life, ever. I found little joy in cheap replacements.

Tonight, the Wings face elimination if they are beaten by the Oilers. Unfortunately, the game is not being played at the Joe and I'll feel like I'm watching the game with people that are cheering against me. I can respect them, but I hate them until the game is over. Because tonight, if elimination is imminent, I am going to swimming in emotion I will fail to be able to control. The team into which I am inexplicably emotionally invested wasn't able to achieve their goal this year. They spent a record regular season preparing for the moment where they could again feel an equal reward for the amount of energy spent and be perfectly content with their performance without the hinderance of what they could have done better, or more efficiently. 

There is a point when you're facing fierce adversity where you either decide to become self-defeatist, or to draw from that energy and overcome it. This is true in hockey, and this is true in life.

Plus, if all I have to look foward to on SportsCenter for the next three months is baseball and golf, or Colorado as the 2006 Stanley Cup Champions, I'll die.