March has never been kind to me. My boys lost. My girls lost. Josh McRoberts is jumping ship. My laptop is acting weird (the kind of weird that makes you nervous about the projects you’ve been working on since the last time you backed everything up and oh dear, why don’t you back everything up every night and seriously, from now on everything is getting backed up every half hour from now on) and my home PC is making a funny noise again, so I think I need to drop a few double sawbucks on an air purifier. And the Phantom Menace is scarred for life. Two years old, not even 9500 miles, still has that new car smell, and I crap it up in a head to head donnybrook with a big jagged rock. It turns out that Paper beats Rock and Car beats Rock, but Paintjob does not.
The last good March I had was when I backpacked around Europe in 2001. We won a national championship that year, I saw Michealangelo’s David (one lone security guard frowning at everyone, with his hand ready on his truncheon, should anyone have the impudence to use the flash on their camera) and the Sistine Chapel (long line, stiff neck), and the world was generally a kinder, less terror-filled place. But I shouldn’t really kvetch, since I can afford a laptop and a PC and a Phantom Menace and colorful outfits I can mix and match as much as I like every morning. And April is almost here and that means the lilacs will bloom soon and everything will be dandy. Just dandy.
And should anyone be willing to fund another backpacking trip for me next March so I can avoid this whole nonsense next year, that would be the dandiest thing of all.