On Second Thought...

This may not come as a surprise to some of you but I’m what some people might call “an opinionated guy”. I tend to take strong stances on an issue and then make a lifetime commitment to stand by that decision no matter what the circumstances.

The reason I do that of course is because I’m almost always right. Seriously, maybe Id be a little less reluctant to change my mind and listen to counterargument if my opinions didn’t turn out to be fact on so many occasions.

If I had to honestly assess the accuracy of my opinions I’d say I’m somewhere between 80 and 85% correct.

Now you could possibly make an argument against the accuracy of my accuracy statistic, (after all 92.8% of all statistics are in fact total fabrications), but you’d be arguing semantics at that point… because again, I’m almost always right.

And it’s for that reason (me being right all the time) that I feel compelled to share with others the few instances when in fact it appears that I may have been wrong about something… Or like in the case I’m about to share with you, I at least might have to rethink my position.

There are actually two positions I’ve decided to rethink right now, but they’re both related to one single issue, and that is, Weather.

You see, I made a decision about 15 years ago that I would never pay attention to weather forecasts. Or at least, I would never actively seek them out.

I came to this conclusion when my father began to obsessively watch the Weather Channel. And despite all his hours listening to “expert” opinion he was no better at predicting the weather than any random idiot stranger on the street that passes by and says things like, “looks like rain!”

My dad usually dropped me off at school in the mornings and as we were leaving the house he always seemed to have some sort of advice about what I should or should not have been wearing that day… “It’s going to be warm today, might wanna leave the jacket behind,” or “are you sure you don’t want to wear something with a hood, it’s supposed to rain this afternoon…” And he was always wrong. Inevitably, I’d be walking home from school in the afternoon carrying an unnecessary rain jacket because he had assured me that I’d need it.

So like I said, my position has always been that I’ll never find myself watching TV and thinking, “Oh I better get to NBC, I don’t want to miss the local weather report.”

And you’ll never catch me checking updates on the internet, or flipping through pages of the newspaper to find out if it’s going to be “partially sunny”, or “partially cloudy”, or whatever it is they say.

I figure that anything big (i.e. snow storm, or a hurricane, or a tornado) is going to be big enough that news of its impending arrival will somehow find its way back to me… Especially with snow… If there is even the slight possibility that we might get some snow and suddenly it’s the only topic for discussion around here… “I heard three inches!”, “Yeah well I heard it only going to be a dusting”, “That’s not true, we’re going to get freezing rain all night and then it’s going to turn to snow just before dawn!”

The other weather related opinion I may need to rethink is the umbrella… I never carry one. As a matter of fact, I’m not even sure if I own one. In my 28 years I can only think of a handful of times where I was totally drenched in rain and wished I’d had an umbrella.

Unfortunately, and this is why I’m suddenly rethinking my position, most of those handful of instances seem to have come within in the past 30 days... I don’t know what’s going on here in our Nation’s Capital but over these past few weeks we’ve been getting some serious rain… I’m talking biblical, drenching rain that doesn’t stop for days… I think the next step is actually frogs… I may even build an arc.

This morning I awoke to water pouring down the drain outside my bedroom window and this has actually become such a familiar sound to my mornings that I didn’t even completely connect that sound with pouring rain until I opened my front door and attempted to step outside. That’s when I got nailed with swollen globs of sideways rain pelting me in the face.

Within seconds I had stepped back into my living room and began reviewing my options.

My hoodie jacket that I normally wear in the rain was sitting at the office because on a similar morning last week I had worn it to work and then left it in the afternoon when things had cleared up… Maybe had I checked the weather yesterday I could have known this was coming and carried the jacket home! Now all I had left to get me through the morning was either a heavy winter coat with no hood or a lighter jacket, also sans hood… and of course, no umbrella.

By the time I got to my office I was completely soaked, and I’m now convinced that my head my head ache may be an early sign of pneumonia from the cold rain pelting my shaved head on my long walk from the metro.

And worse yet, I’m admitting that 2 long standing policies I’ve had may be wrong.

In short, it’s been a shitty morning. I think my position is going to be that I need to start keeping an umbrella in my car and proceed normally with my stance on weather reports… but this position too may change if any frogs land on my head on my walk back to the metro this afternoon.