Run. Dog. Cat. Cat. Me.

Good luck with that.

I’m sure it’s the same for you two faithful followers of my world-famous, mind-numbingly fascinating blog in which I constantly whine about butts falling off, snakes, crappy weather, and tigers in bathrooms; probably you, like me, think that everyone around you is somehow doing just a bit better, somehow just one percentage point less nervous, less worried, more happy, more confident.  Probably the boss likes them one little bit better than they like you.  Probably they’ve never walked out of the bathroom with toilet paper hanging out the back of their shorts.

A while back, when Becky and Heather were finally medicated to an acceptable level and allowed back out in public, they would message me.

HEY!  I’m going swimming tomorrow, wanna go?

No.

It’ll be fun!

No.

Come on, you’ll like it once you try it.

No.

The entire time I was saying no I knew I needed to do this.  This was where I had a choice.  Become a smaller person, saying no, tightening my circle just a bit, then a bit more, then a bit more.  I’m sure a lot of people are the same way, but there’s only me living in this head and in this life, only what I interpret.  I assume there are more of me out there, struggling not to get smaller, not to live a more circumscribed life, scared and uncertain how to achieve it, but I only know myself.

Heather and Becky make it look so easy that I figure they’re cool with it all.  They use words like “fun” which makes one think more of things like birthday parties and cake and ice cream.  Or coffee.  Or wine.  Or anything other than swimming with the eventual goal being getting out of the pool and into a fish poop filled lake.  After the snake issue on Tuesday, however, I realized that they have just been doing a better job than I of hiding it.  Becky doesn’t like her wetsuit and neither of them like snakes at all.  The messages are flying.

ARG!  I woke up next to the bed beating the invisible spiders I just dreamed of!!

ARG!  What’s the lake temp??

ARG!  I can’t breathe in that wetsuit!!

LOL, snake code:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Snake
_____________ Dead snake
—___—___— Oops, just ran over a snake.

ARG!  Just because ARG!!!

After realizing this was not the Bataan Death March – which was truly a horror – seriously, I’m not gonna die.  I’m not going to lose my family or job or anything, I’m just going to swim in a freeking lake – which is only 4 feet deep and I’m 5’8″, so standing up is an option.  Then I just have to ride my bike, which I could fall off of, but then I’ve already stepped on my own finger; at some point you have to accept that stuff happens.  And finally I get to do my favorite thing: run.  So I managed to switch off a couple of the Panic Buttons in my brain.

I’m a believer in signs, albeit a rather fair-weather believer.  Obviously when things line up like I prefer it’s got to be a good sign.  If the signs are bad I may or may not give it some consideration.  For instance, the sign that says Speed Limit 55.  Because personally, that’s just stupid and I’m not going to give that any consideration.  I’m sure most people are like me, but there could be some who prefer bad signs and not having anything line up well.  Those people probably also do 55 in the 55mph zone.  Then they probably also get yelled at by me, which will surprise you both, that I would be in my car yelling &^$$# driver (*&^ your mother is a $#@!!!!

I have a chin hair roughly the width and tenacity of a piece of baling wire, which I’ve had since the twins were still in high school, making it about 10 years old.  A quick internet search shows that the anagen phase of growth of a hair follicle is an average 2 to 8 years.  My chin hair, which I should probably just go ahead and name since we’ve grown so close, has obviously surpassed this lifespan.  If it were a person it would be my Grandma Alice, who lived to 103 years, only she was nice and did not resemble a piece of baling wire in any way.

The reason I mention this is that I managed to pluck the damn thing out in one try yesterday morning.  This is an incredible stroke of good luck on my part, having ruined several pair of tweezers over the past 10 years, not to mention accidentally slamming my hand against the mirror repeatedly when the tweezers fail.  That hurts.  Hey, at least I never broke the mirror, right?  Otherwise for sure the damn thing would live another 7 years.  I expect that, having outed my chin hair in this public manner, I will no longer receive anonymous emailed marriage proposals or offers for £1million to be deposited directly into my bank account.   So you see how much good luck that is!

Then Heather saw another dead snake on her bike ride yesterday, making it two days in a row of dead snakes!  That’s a much better sign than live snakes.  And when we were first starting out on the bikes, before we even started, I almost fell over!  So that was good!  The almost part, I mean.   After the ride I got in the car and it was 12:34 which is my lucky number.  And THEN – I got Taco Bell for lunch.  That is a very good sign.  You might think a person can get Taco Bell any day, but you can’t.  If you have no money in the car, you have no Taco Bell in your tummy.  Yes.  Now you understand how tenuous the hold on luck can truly be.

So you see, luck is in the eye of the beholder.  Well, except when it’s actually your real eyeball and it’s the bug that flew in Becky’s on the bike ride at the very same time a rabid ant was in her cycling shoe biting the stew out of her foot, which seemed rather unlucky.  Although it was a lot unluckier for the bug and the ant, both of whom got squashed rapidly.

I’m telling you what, with all this good luck floating around I expect that I may not have to worry about the swim, for all I know I’ll be able to walk on water by Saturday.