The Wynia Curse

I'm home from work today with back pain that makes my moving around look like I belong in a nursing home. While I'm confident I'll be back to normal and at work on Monday, this caps off a week that is almost making me a believer in the Wynia Curse.

Officially (as officially as a family tradition gets), the Wynia Curse is mostly a coping mechanism for the series of unfortunate events that seem to happen with disturbing frequency to everyone in the family line. These events are not just strange for their frequency but for the circumstances that surround them.

For instance, when I broke my left wrist when I was 14 (in itself an unfortunate, but not uncommon occurrence), I didn't do it in any "normal" way. I broke it on the ferris wheel at an amusement park while on a youth trip for church. After I broke it, my friends left me (thinking I was faking) and I sat on a bench, in shock. As I sat there, a rain storm that ended up dumping 2 inches in a little less than an hour and a half started and my situation became wet in addition to pathetic.

More recently, my grandmother was sitting in her lift chair in the nursing home and the controller shorted out and started on fire and spread to her clothes and chair. She was alone in the room and couldn't reach the call button to get a nurse. So, by the time the screams brought someone to the room, she had 2nd degree burns from the fire.

When this kind of stuff happens to your family on a *regular* basis, but somehow it all ends up OK, you sort of develop a darker sense of humor than you might otherwise have and the Wynia Curse is part of that. When this stuff happens, it often gets just brushed off as being part of the curse and we move on. It's pretty much a coping mechanism for dealing with

Now, my rational brain does NOT believe in curses. Many of the unfortunate events in my own life could have been prevented by being more careful (if you're using a pitchfork in chest deep water, harvesting chopped seaweed, make sure you can keep track of where your feet are if you don't want to run the implement through your foot). Many others in my own case were just freakish and that sort of crap happens. My upper brain is 100% certain that there's no actual curse. However, the lower, less rational portions of my brain kicks in when this stuff happens and is is *just* as certain that not only is there a curse out there, but it's taken me and my family as a full-time job, occasionally taking on an assistant to do the job right.

Unfortunately, like all of the rest of these battles between instinctual emotion and rational thought, it's a more difficult battle than it ought to be. However, every time I battle through this and put the rational side in charge of the issue, things *always* turn out better.

I basically treat my brain as a computer with an old operating system that I can't upgrade, swap out or otherwise change. Running on top of that are various bits of software that I have to work on building and patching that compensate for the inadequacies of the lower level operating system.

Here's to writing a handler for the curse.