Be Careful What You Wish For

So a few nights ago I dreamt that I was going to compete in an international bowling tournament. Right before I was set to leave for the tournament I turned to Todd and said, “You know what? I don’t even have a bowling ball.”

I realize most dreams are absurd, but this is absurd for a number of reasons.

First of all, I’ve only bowled about a half-dozen times in my life, and am about at the level where strikes are rare and happy accidents.

Second of all, the idea of me competing in international anything, let alone something that requires coordination and physical skill, is an absurdity in itself.

Third of all, if for some reason the planets did realign and I was to compete in an international bowling tournament, it would have occurred to me well before it was time to leave that I didn’t have a bowling ball. The selection of a bowling ball while bowling has been extremely problematic for me. You see, I’m not very strong and have small hands, so I need a bowling ball that is light with the finger holes close together. But, for some reason the joint on my thumb is disproportionately large, so if I find a bowling ball that meets the above criteria, my thumb invariably gets stuck in the thumb hole. When one is bowling and goes to release the ball and it gets stuck on one’s thumb, it sort of breaks the rhythm of one’s bowling form.

Anyway, the bowling ball problem would have been priority number one, as every time I’ve ever gone bowling I’ve spent a large amount of time wandering around the bowling alley sticking my thumb in all the bowling balls, trying to find one that worked. This also causes me to miss my turn and have to bowl out of order, which is apparently A Big Deal and annoys Theodore to no end. The rules of the game are very important to Theodore, whether one is bowling, playing putt-putt, or reneging during a game of Euchre. Ask me how I know.

And less importantly, so I’m not going to dwell on it, is that I was getting away by myself to a foreign country for several days and was about as blasé about it as I would have been about going to work on your average Monday.

I told Todd my dream the next morning. He listened thoughtfully and said, “Well, if that really did happen we would just go and see Fuzz and have him drill the thumb hole a bit bigger.”

Let’s just gloss over the fact that a) the bowling alley guy’s name is Fuzz and b) Todd knows this and reflect a bit on the differences between men and women. I presented my husband with a problem and he offered the solution. So if any surprise bowling competitions arise, I can rest comfortably in the knowledge that Todd has my back. And while Todd is extremely loving and sensitive, he is a computer programmer for whom life is a series of “if, then” statements.

You see, this dream was so not about bowling, it’s about feeling out of your element and maybe about taking on a freelance writing assignment that is so far out of your area of expertise that you sense that any minute now you will be exposed as a fraud, that when you step up to the line, you’re going to get your thumb stuck and the guy that hired you will be sitting there at the scary electronic scoreboard and stiffen his jaw and have to reprogram the whole thing while you wander about the bowling alley trying to find a research materials that will accommodate your freakishly large thumb.

Or that when you turn in the first part of the assignment you’re going to ricochet the golf ball off the windmill down below to the hole with the clown’s head and someone will have to retrieve it for you and then you’ll be so slow that the group of octogenarian ladies behind you is going to have to play through and your husband who shot 75 at Pebble Beach is going to die of embarrassment and the clients who are depending on the timely delivery of your portion of the project will be left cooling their heels and will decide to go with another company the next time.

Or that when you play your next card you’re going to throw out the arch bower when you just lost the previous trick with a four of hearts which means you didn’t follow suit and your husband remembers this because he’s a computer programmer and just remembers these things and the entire project will fall behind.

I had always told myself that the reason I wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat worrying about work was because I’m in the unique position to kill somebody if I make a mistake. I always thought that if I ever did have a job where mistakes were not in any way fatal (unless I cause the company to go into financial ruin and the owner either commits suicide or dies of a stroke), that I would be the happiest, most calm person alive.

But here I am. And even if I do something so glaring as to write that the sun sets in the east and the Earth rotates around the moon nobody is going to die. But still I am a nervous wreck.

And yet I plug along, chagrined to discover that the fear of looking bad is just as powerful as the fear of hurting someone else.

Perhaps I should go and compound some IV chemotherapy as a relaxation exercise.

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