Turn, turn, turn

Possibly the most important thing Mufasa taught his son, Simba, in The Lion King was that life had a circle. Things have a beginning and things have an ending. The Byrds also teach this important lesson when they sing, "To everything (turn, turn turn) there is a season (turn, turn, turn) and a time for every purpose under heaven - a time to be born, a time to die..." I think they may have gotten that from somewhere else, though.

It seems that, for me, this has been a season of death more than birth. I already posted once about my alarm clock dieing (the first turn), but if that had been the only thing, I would have been fine. However, it's been a rough little while - you know what they say: bad things come in threes...turn, turn, turn.

If I'd been paying attention to that karmic adage I would have been on my toes, watching for the other two impending deaths. Unfortunately, I failed to heed the warning of karma and have suffered the consequences. Fortunately, I've completed the fatal trifecta and have lived to tell the tale.

As many of you know, I am in a graduate program working on a degree in Public Administration. Part of being in a graduate program entails the necessity of owning a laptop, which I affectionately call "Pam" (an anagram of MPA - the program I'm in). Well, unbeknownst to me, Pam recently started having health problems and on a sad Sunday a couple weeks ago, gave up the ghost...or the hard drive. The second turn. After talking to half of India (apparently where HP's customer service/tech support centers are located), I was able to get the much needed replacement hard drive and have since brought Pam back to life. However, it's a different Pam, a Pam who once was dead and now is alive, a veritable vampire of computers. A Pampire, if you will.

Shortly after Pam expired, I was laying on the floor in my living room, wearing a favorite pair of plaid pajama pants, watching television. I happened to glance down at my black plaid pants and saw a flash of white. Weird. Upon closer examination, I noticed that the white was coming from under the pants. I had split the seam and torn the area surrounding the seam without knowing it. The third turn. These weren't just any pajama pants, these were special. Growing up, our family had a Christmas tradition of getting pajamas on Christmas Eve and I had been given this pair circa Christmas Eve 2002 -- the last pair I'd been given in this tradition.

Using amazing powers of deduction, I determined that the splitting was caused by the pants' shrinking. Over the years, a sedentary lifestyle, unhealthy eating habits, and a slowing metabolism combined to shrink the PJ's approximately three sizes and created a curve-hugging pair of pajamas that had no equal. Shrinkage is no myth folks - it's a fact.

Julius Caesar was warned about the ides of March. Too bad nobody told me about the ides of April.