Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Calm Yourself, It's Probably A Fluke

In two days it will have been exactly one year since my last post. I suppose I could wait for two days to write, but that would be just so darn expected. And why would ANYONE do what is expected if they could flip the situation and do the...wait for it...unexpected. So Bam, Flip! A post.

Last weekend Paul came home with a horseshoe set. What? Horseshoes. We are, apparently, a family who horseshoes. He jammed two pieces of rebar (it looks like rebar.I keep having visions of one of the kids taking a nosedive and impaling themselves on our lawn game. Always the fatalist, me) into the ground, and before long he and the kids were flinging U-shaped hunks of metal across the patchy brown weeds that serve as our lawn. After three or so poorly-aimed throws, Paul decided that maybe he should move his car out of the line of fire and ensconce the dogs safely in the house. And...that's the end of my story.

Except that last night I tried the horseshoes. And I failed. Badly. And this made me angry. (I don't like not being good at things. You know, the first try, without practice, all that.) And the angrier I got the worse I threw the damn shoes. At one point I even attempted an overhand fling at the rebar, and only succeeded in ripping out a chunk of weeds. Meanwhile, Paul stoically made points on each perfectly aimed toss. Ok, he didn't. In reality, he wasn't throwing much better than I was, but that didn't keep me from losing it a little bit more each time I missed.

It is not fun, apparently, to play games with me. Turns out I'm a bit of a sore loser. I guess I'm known to occasionally have a little temper tantrum when things don't go as I think they should. Maybe I should add that to my mile long list of things about myself that need to be fixed.

In the end, I apologized to Paul for being a big, giant, candyass crybaby (that line, by the way, was stolen from a fight between two co-workers that I had the pleasure of overhearing today), and I promised that I would try to ...you know, grow up. And then he made fun of me.

But it occurred to me that I could use this event, this realization in a creative way. So I've decided that it's time to embrace my ridiculous.

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