If You Could Do It Over Again

I’ve never understood the “If You Could Do It Over Again” game. The premise is that we’ve all made mistakes or done ill-advised things over the course of our lives, and if we could go back in time, which of those embarrassments would we retract? Yes, all of us have made bad decisions or acted in ways we’ve later regretted. What if I would have married that girl I was seriously dating when I was 18 (who wanted to marry me)? What if I would have continued my meager music career instead of going to college? What if I would have majored in Biology instead of English? What if I had gone to law school instead of grad school in theater? What if I wouldn’t have married my first wife? What if my first wife and I hadn’t divorced? What if I would have followed my mentor to Yale instead of staying at Iowa? What if I would have stayed on in business instead of going into teaching? And on and on and on. There are so many decisions and actions we make along the way that shape and direct our lives, some of them obviously of import at the time, most of them seemingly minor. But the fallacy of the “If You Could Do It Over Again” game is that every decision and every act that you make along the way contributes to the way it all turns out. If you pull out any one thread, the whole fabric unravels. Perhaps if you’re a mass murderer, you might be able to play the game in a way to see how things might have turned out in a more positive way (unless you were satisfied with the mass murderer’s life). But if you’re like most people who reach relatively middle or older age in a relatively comfortable manner, there’s no way of knowing how deleting an earlier (seeming) misstep might have altered your trajectory. We are who we are by all of the decisions we make, good or ill, and – perhaps more important – by all the accidents and flukes that come along by chance. We are in the end not arrows, shot straight on a line from bow to a target, but more billiard balls, careening off railings and bumpers and one another and falling somehow, eventually, hopefully, into a pocket.

Chopping Off My Finger

Once or twice a year, while preparing dinner, I chop off a finger. Okay, I don’t chop off the whole finger, just the tip. Not the whole tip (though that has been done), but I do slice through enough of the finger (or thumb) to produce gushing blood and shouts of horror. Part of this is usually due to dull knives. But much is no doubt due to a reckless confidence enhanced by a few too many pre-dinner beers. And then there’s the Food Channel. I don’t watch as much as I used to, but from watching more than I should I have picked up the notion that good cooks are able to fly through a couple of green peppers and an onion with their knives flashing, cutting boards slapping, hands intact.

But my concern is not my ineptitude at chopping vegetables. That’s something I’ve learned to live (if somewhat tenuously) with. What I don’t understand is why they can’t make bandaids that can cover and secure wounds at the end of one’s digits. It’s an awkward part of the body, to be sure, but then what part of the body isn’t? I go to the drugstore and there are shelves of bandaids of all different kinds, fabrics, textures, colors, shapes, and sizes. But there are none that really work well, particularly at the end of one’s hands. Bandaids are flat, mostly rectangular, and despite what it says on the box, not all that flexible. The end of the finger is tubular, curved, and bends in at least two or three ways. Well, at least it does before it’s been sliced through by a 12” chef’s knife.

Vatican Leaks

The story of the Vatican leaks – the Pope’s butler leaks personal letters and other documents for the Pope to a journalist who writes a book revealing the leaks – is curious in how it’s been covered, from the charging of the butler a few months ago, to his being convicted (any surprise there?) this week, to his expected pardon in the next few days (the church is, after all, about forgiveness). In all of the stories I’ve read about the scandal, the scandal is not in what the documents reveal about the Vatican but rather in the leaks themselves. What the documents reveal is “the intrigue, petty infighting and allegations of corruption and homosexual liaisons that plague the Vatican’s secretive universe,” a line only given in passing in some of the stories and not at all in others. Let me repeat what the documents reveal: “the intrigue, petty infighting and allegations of corruption and homosexual liaisons that plague the Vatican’s secretive universe.” Why is that not the story? Could we get more details? How widespread and far up does this intrigue, infighting, corruption, and homosexual liaisons go? What did the Pope know, and when did he know it? When John Dean made public the existence of the Nixon tapes, it was the tapes – and the crimes they exposed – that was the news. Why aren’t the Vatican documents – and the crimes they expose – the story here? Oh, right, it’s the Vatican, where keeping what goes on within the secretive universe secret is sacred. Sorry.

My Ortho Family

For the past decade or so I’ve been going regularly to an orthopedic clinic to have various broken parts of my body pieced back together again, or at least jury rigged with bailing wire and duct tape. I’ve shown up alternatively for treatment and surgery for Dupuytren’s Contracture in both hands and Osteoarthritis in my left knee and hands. It took maybe a dozen visits before the receptionists recognized me and, foregoing my name, only had to ask “Which doctor are you seeing today?” The clinic is large, usually with 15-20 patients waiting in the lobby. A nurse will come out every couple of minutes and call out a name and take the patient back to an examining room. Not me. The nurse just comes to the lobby, finds me without calling my name, says “Ready?”, and back we go. My file is the size of a phone book. I’ve suggested they go digital to save them space and having to wheel it down the hall on a dolly whenever I visit. (It’s under consideration.)

After the first few years of this I felt bad about being reminded repeatedly how decrepit my body is and how old I’m getting. It’s somewhat depressing to have a tab at an orthopedic clinic (they no longer ask for my co-pay when I check out). But recently I’ve been feeling more positive about my relationship with the doctors, nurses, technicians, and staff at the clinic. Our familiarity is comforting, like visiting old friends. No, more like family. My ortho family. We should make a TV commercial, one of those where I enter, happy and smiling, limping on my cane, and they gather around me, cheerful and welcoming. Maybe there are balloons. And flowers. And the Turtles’ “Happy Together” is playing. What knee replacement? What degenerative bone disease? "So happy together."

The Two Worst Teams In Baseball

If you haven’t been paying attention to the Chicago Cubs’ season this year and are wondering how they’ve been doing, consider this: You can get tickets to their final home series against the Houston Astros for 74¢ for Monday night’s game, 97¢ for Tuesday night’s game, and for Wednesday afternoon’s final game of the season, 50¢. Of course, there is a $5.45 delivery fee and a $5 “convenience” fee, making the final cost of the ticket itself about 5/1000^th of the total cost. And yes these are upper deck and obstructed-view seats, but since there will be more empty seats than sold seats you can pretty well sit wherever you want. This is what happens when you have the worst two teams in Major League Baseball – Cubs at 60-100 and Astros at 54-106 – playing each other the final week of the season. There are other series this week where out-of-it teams might be able to play a spoiler roll and knock another team out of the playoffs, or log an end-of-the-season moral victory over a team headed to the playoffs. But here you have two teams that are at best battling for the worst record in baseball. I guess that’s worth about 50¢ (plus convenience fee).

Call of the Campaigns

The calls began several months ago. Some were from one political candidate or another, but most were surveys (though I suspected they were surveys from campaigns). They would come two, three, four times a day. Most of the time I would simply hang up when I heard the delay between my “Hello” and the inevitable beginning of the robo-call. Occasionally I would wait for the beginning of the call, then yell “Fuck you!” and hang up on a recorded message. But soon I began taking the surveys. Though I thought I was doing so in a subversive way:

“What age are you?” – 18

“What is your gender?” – Female

“What is your race?” – Black

“Do you agree with the policies of Barack Obama?” – Yes

“Do you agree with the policies of Mitt Romney?” – No

“Who will you vote for in November?” – Mitt Romney

I thought this was a pretty clever way to subvert these impersonal surveys. But recently I’ve been receiving more robo-calls, and they’re all from the Republican National Committee or the Romney campaign, including personal (recorded) calls from Romney and Ryan. Apparently my cute attempt at subversion has resulted in my being tagged a Romney supporter and that that campaign is trying to get me out to vote. So now I’m back to simply hanging up. But I also yell “Fuck you!” when I do so. No one is listening, I realize, but there’s still some satisfaction in expressing rage, if only for its own sake.