Random Thought

Whenever I go for a walk, be it with my dog or to the bus stop, I am careful not to step on a crack out of respect to my mom's back. Lines are also avoided for fear of breaking my dad's spine. Sad but true, all these years later, I still find myself following the golden childhood rules of walking on a sidewalk.

But when I go running, I don't follow the rule; Scoliosis of the Parents be damned. And now that there will be a matted inch of snow on everyone's sidewalk between now and March, walking just got a lot easier. The lines and cracks are nowhere to be seen.

As a sign of some maturity, I did give up knocking on wood not too long ago.

I also stopped holding my breath when I passed a graveyard. However, I was holding my breath more out of a personal "Can I Do It?" challenge than a fear of being buried in a specific cemetary. But I really let go of that superstition a few years ago, when Emily and I used to live by a cemetary. We drove by it at least twice-weekly. It became tiresome to hold my breath each time, especially since we drove along one side of it, took a turn and drove along another side of it.

Well now that I think of it, I first broke that superstition in a college cross country meet that had us running through a graveyard. Running close to oxygen debt makes it tough to hold your breath; so I breathed, DEEPLY, through that random cemetary that was somewhere in Wisconsin, Iowa, or Illinois. Does that mean I'll be buried in that cemetary, wherever it was? Was it Missouri?

Actually, I've always had trouble embracing this superstition. My understanding was if you couldn't hold your breath all the way past the cemetary, you'd be buried there. This has always troubled me, as you had little to worry about if you simply breathed in front of multiple cemetaries (unless, of course being drawn and quartered was in your near future).

This has become a grim post. Maybe it's because my annual employee review is tomorrow in less than 12 hours. I have little to worry about as I have done my job well this year, as I do every year, but still. Ugh. Do I really need to be blogging about being drawn and quartered at this time?