"Why Me?"

Is it just me? Or does everyone ask this question when things go wrong.

My ex-wife, Alexis, used to combat feeling sorry for herself with a kind of faux-bravado. She was slowly wasting away from Multiple Sclerosis, and she liked to say that instead of asking "Why Me" she would instead ask "Why NOT me?" Saying this seemed to satisfy her Leonine pride (early August birthday, dontcha know), but she never saw that she contradicted herself when she would confidently declare that she would NEVER end up, like her brother, in a nursing home. (Google +"William DeFotis" +music). He had been diagnosed with MS about the same time she had, but had progressed quite rapidly despite his efforts to stay active. He had been working hard from a manual wheelchair at his full-time job as a music professor at William and Mary, and just collapsed one day into a coma from which he miraculously recovered, but just barely. He was never able to work after that. "Why NOT me" didn't apply to her in that case.

As it worked out, she bypassed the long stay in the nursing home and went to her grave a full year and five days before he did. I *think* she chose dying over wasting away.

One of Robert Heinlein's characters, Max Jones said of the epitaph he had devised for his friend Sergeant Sam Anderson:

• He had considered, "He played the cards he was dealt" but that didn't fit Sam either; if Sam didn't like the cards, he sometimes slipped in a whole new deck.

But I digress.

Today, I finally found time to install my spiffy new in-dash CD/MP3 player, and when I connected all the wires and tried to fire her up, nothing happened! Playing detective, I discovered that the yellow wire that was supposed to bring +12V 24/7 was dead. Curious, because it had always worked before for the CD player I was replacing. With some trepidation, I wired the yellow lead to the red one and, Voila! She works! Except now she forgets all her settings every time you turn off the ignition!

Peculiar!

Why would the yellow lead break just then?!?

Well, maybe it was a weak connection to begin with, and my moving the wiring around made it finally give up the ghost!

But still, I ask myself, is it FAIR? Now, every time I get out of the car, the player forgets which of the 100 MP3 tracks it was playing and starts over from track one. So I am going to have to punch the Track plus key (or the Track minus key) up to fifty times to get back where I was.

On the other hand, when I think of all the poor schlubs in the world that DON'T have Radio Paradise on MP3's in their car, I think I'm pretty darn lucky!

You know, I was orignally going to make this post a long discourse on feeling "Stuck", but Robert Pirsig did so much better at it with his book "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" so I should just insert a link to that book in Amazon.com!

Or, in the words of the immortal Deteriorata:

"Take heart amid the deepening gloom that your dog is finally getting enough cheese; and reflect that whatever misfortune may be your lot, it could only be worse in Milwaukee".

PS - you think the RED lead is thinking "Why not me"?!?