Areas of Unrest

2 April 2000 - A Personal Pantheon

QOTD: "Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists upon it." - Russell Baker

Reading: May 2000 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine

Listening to: Paris Combo

One thing I've always admired about the ancient Greeks and Romans was their ability to blame every personal failing on some minor offense to some more or less obscure deity. Have a fight with your significant other? Don't worry - it's Cupid's fault, not your own. Lose your job? Obviously you forgot to sacrifice three lead pencils to the goddess Secretaria. And how dare you neglect the pannikin of beer for the god Digitalis! Surely, you will now be stricken with hangnails!

I like this approach so much that I have decided to adopt it as my very own way to avoid responsibility for my life. For example, today I finally sat down to do my taxes, only to discover I didn't have two of the forms I needed. In the old days, I would berate myself for having mistakenly believed the instruction booklet for those forms included the forms themselves. But now, I realize that I was temporarily blinded by the god Incomius, who befuddled my mind because my relief that I will never again have to deal with the tax implications of owning shares in the Boston Celtics offended his love of basketball. (Free financial tip here: Never buy shares in a publicly traded limited partnership unless you love paperwork. I read through 29 pages of instructions for the limited partnership form before discovering that none of the above applied if the partnership was publicly traded. No investment is so cool that it is worth enduring that.)

Let's move on to the chaos that is my living room. I insist that no matter how hard I try, all of my good work is undone by the goddess, Vacuumia, as a result of my childhood hubris in thinking that I could get away with hiding things in the closet instead of putting them away. She throws things on the floor as fast as I can clean them away.

Finally, the astonishing pain in my right shoulder at the moment can't possibly have anything to do with the combination of too much time on the computer, carrying a very heavy briefcase on that shoulder and being contorted into an unnatural position on the plane home Wednesday night. It must, instead, be the fault of Bursit, the god of rotator cuff injuries. I am not exactly sure what I did to offend him, but it will require several sacrifices of shoulder steaks before even the finest medical help will be of any use. In the meantime, I can try to engage him in battle with Salicylicum (the god of analgesics) and hope that she will prevail until I can enlist the oracles of Kaiser in my battle.