Groucho Marx once quipped that he wouldn’t join any club which would have him as a member. Sometimes I feel that way. Who would want my brand of insanity and self-doubt?
But recently, I found a group that not only seemed to fit my personality, but, by some miracle, they also wanted me.
I am talking about the Dollar Shave Club. This decision will change my life.
In “Groundhog Day,” one of my favorite movies, Phil Connors picks an enjoyable day from his past and wonders, “Why couldn’t I get that day over, and over, and over….”
Now I don’t want to make it sound like I am stuck in an endless loop at this point in my life, but I look back to what I was doing 20 years ago today and wonder if I could get that day over and over and over.
Less than two years out of college, a short period of unemployment had just ended when I accepted a job in Hanover. While that does rank up there because it led me to my wife and all the wonderful things which have happened over the past two decades, April 3, 1992 stands out for a different reason.
Baltimore opened its new baseball stadium that day.
I try to help around the house as much as I can. My limited skills (and interest) disqualify me from many chores, but I still like to think I contribute to the common good.
The other night I could see that my wife just needed a break. She had a busy week. I needed to step up my game.
Lucky for me, the task Maria needed help with ranked up there as one of my favorites – grocery shopping.
I have to give my wife credit. She only wanted to try something different and make dinner a little more healthy.
A month or so ago, Maria found a recipe for bean burgers. When I saw it laying around the kitchen, I started to laugh.
Bean burgers sounded like something a group of people in a mountain commune would eat for a special occasion. That didn’t fit my profile.
But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. As we get older, we do have to pay more attention to the things we eat.
I already try to limit the amount of red meat I eat. Every once in a while, I will go for turkey burgers to try and mix things up. Why not bean burgers?
A lot of people have placed an undue focus on 2012 because they think the Mayans predicted the world would end later this year.
We can accomplish very little by sitting and talking about the absurdity of an ancient culture using some stone tablet thousands of years ago to accurately predict the apocalypse. We’d probably be funnier than the skit “Saturday Night Live” did on it a couple of months ago, but that’s not important right now.
What’s important is how this whole doomsday discussion has missed the one truly amazing thing about the 2012 calendar, a special alignment which happens this week.
The first two days of March Madness fall directly prior to St. Patrick’s Day, which falls on a Saturday.