Freakshow of luck

I win a lot of stuff. This has not always been the case; I won Optimus Prime in a drawing at Shop-Rite when I was 7, and then pretty much nothing else until college. I’m also leaving out anything merit-based in this assessment. Sure, it was awesome to snag a first place in the 6th grade monthly writing contest but I would really like to think that had nothing to do with luck.

But starting around my junior year in college, I’ve had an uncanny touch when it comes to winning random contests, raffles and drawings. All of this is not to gloat – luck is not an ability; by its nature luck is something that we have no control over and therefore nothing that I can take credit for. However, I am starting to believe it is a genetic gift, and I would just like to share my gratitude.

My father’s mother, my Oma, is the luckiest person I have heard of. From major life events to the smallest happenstances, she finds good fortune at every turn. There is almost no way for me to fully explain about my Oma’s extraordinary luck without including an extremely depressing back-story, so I’ll just put it this way: her life-long lucky streak makes me believe in things I would rather be cynical and dismissive of. I am no where NEAR as insanely lucky as she is, but I am getting warmer.

In the winter of 1999 I won TWO separate radio contests on two different stations, approximately one month apart. In the first one, the prize was dinner and two tickets to a Uconn Lady Huskies Basketball Game. Pretty sweet and I had a wicked bad cold when I won, so that cheered me up considerably. The second prize was two-fold: first I won tickets to a Rod Stewart concert. I promised to take my best friend to the show, and when MH protested, I told him he could come with me if I won the grand prize trip to Los Angeles to see a taping of the Tonight Show. Well, he and I still think Burbank is generally a waste of space but that Darrell Hammond is a gifted impersonator.

Lately, the Edge Theater Company has been the source of some of my more memorable wins. From a $200 gift certificate to Bluefly.com handed to me by Philip Seymour Hoffman, to an alleged dinner at Medieval Times with the band Run Run Riot (still waiting to hear from those folks…), I called both of my wins ahead of time, adding another ring to the freak show.

Today I received notice that I won The Morning News’ Headlines Pop Quiz. (Side note: I love this site, and reading through most of the stories linked in the headlines makes me feel just a little smarter at the end of the week.) I am still delighted when stuff like this happens, if less surprised than mere mortals might be.

My To-Do List

• Get manicure
• Book room in Portland, ME for wedding…in 4 weeks
• Buy Ziploc bags and dryer sheets
• Finish blogging about the Personality Matrix
• Look up A-Rod’s current HR total; realize I failed to match my number of blog posts in June
• Blog about how I suck worse than the Yankees
• Re-read Harry Potter 5 & 6 before 7 comes out…in 2 weeks
• See Once and Ratatouille in theaters
• Clear out sacks of old clothes from under the bed; donate to Sal’s Army or the freegans
• Haircut?
• Get my photo taken with the very large poster of Max outside of the Brooks Atkinson, thus killing two birds: making up for lost cell phone photo tragedy AND replacing tired MySpace pic that I am sick of looking at.
• Blog more

Personality Matrix

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