Cubbies Win It All!!!

There is really only one thing I could blog about today. The Curse of the Billy Goat is broken!! The Cubs have won the World Series!! My grandpa, who was a huge Cubs fan, didn’t live to see this day, but then he did live through two championships, when he was a tiny baby. There is one fan who is 108 who said she would love to see a second championship during her lifetime – and she did! One hundred and eight years – a very long time to go between championships! As someone noted on social media right after the win: “Time since the Cubs won their last pennant – five minutes!” Before the game people were posting graphs of who was supporting the Cubs vs. the Indians, and the poor Indians were only favored in Ohio; the rest of the country was solidly pulling for the Cubs. Who wouldn’t want the Lovable Losers to finally win?

Travalon and I watched the first five innings of the game at the Parched Eagle with the brew master and some other random guys (I was the only woman), then we headed home to watch the second half of the game. The Cubs had a solid lead, but they made some errors, and Chapman was so tired that he pitched a two-run homer to tie things up. Whoa, we were heading into a tenth inning! Then – just to ratchet up the tension – there was a rain delay of about a quarter of an hour. In the tenth the Cubbies scored two runs, but then the Indians scored one, and just when it seemed that we might be heading into yet another inning, there was an easy out and it was all over! I screamed so loudly! My neighbors might hate me, unless they were also watching. This has to have been the most exciting World Series in years, maybe ever: two teams suffering from championship droughts, the Cubs down three games at one point, and then this dogfight of a game at the end. They only won by one run, but who cares? The Curse is finally broken! 

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Curses Again! (Or, How I Got Hoodoo'd)

There is a huge storm here today, so I skied into work with Hardingfele. That took a little longer than I expected, even minus the break to get coffee and a croissant. I figured on brownie points for just showing up, but wouldn't you know that everyone else was here too, and on time! So here I am in an old hoodie emblazoned with the name of a state I have never lived in (another thing left to me by the former owner of Sylvia and the electric mandolin) and slippers, since I didn't want to wear ski boots all day, and everyone else looks like their normal selves. And why did I bother fixing my hair??? Hardingfele was laughing at me because my mascara ran in all this driving snow. "You look like Tammy Faye Baker!" she said.

(That's for Rich, so he knows what he's missing over there in Japan.)

In the electric Mideastern band I play in, we do an Arabic-tinged version of "I Put a Spell on You." (We also do this great flamenco version of Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit.") And do you know, I have had a spell put on me! If you remember my post about curses, people often put curses on other people without thinking about what they are saying. I had completely forgotten that this had happened to me.

Some terminology: there is probably a technical difference, but in popular parlance, "voodoo" refers to an actual religion that is an amalgamation of Catholicism and African spirit possession, while "hoodoo" refers to folk magic which is often malicious. So as opposed to Voodoo Head, the benevolent little doll that improves peoples' careers (he is currently hanging out with a busmate, improving hers), I will refer to my ex as Hoodoo Head. This would be the boy I was madly in love with in college. You see, ever since returning from visiting my family for Thanksgiving, I kept having romantic dreams about him. I thought, is this payback for talking smack about that acquaintance pining for four years over a guy she dated for a month? I have always maintained that you should not mourn longer for the relationship than it actually lasted, but here I was all googoo once again about a guy I hadn't seen in three and a half times as many years as I'd actually dated him! If a child had been born the last time I'd seen him, that kid would now have to pay adult rates at the movies! So what was my problem?

To remind myself of what a jerk he was, I reread my diary entries pertaining to him. However, that was a mistake because I thought, "Hm, maybe he wasn't as big a jerk as I remembered. Maybe some of it was me being a jerk." Which is true for everyone, I suppose, when they look back at their younger years, but in my case there was a specific reason which I will discuss in a subsequent post. (To add insult to injury, he ended up with someone who was very similar to me but without this particular reason for being a jerk.) Then, to my surprise, I found where he actually once said to me, "I hope you never get over me." He done hoodoo'd me!! And I had completely forgotten about it.

I think Hoodoo Head put this curse on me without much thought, and probably at a time when he thought we might end up together forever, in which case it would make a little more sense. However, it was a cruel thing to do because he did end up with someone else, so why would he even need me to never get over him? Honestly, he would probably be a little creeped out to know that I even think about him at all after all these years. (But since he doesn't read this blog, all my readers can feel free to agree that he has nobody but himself to blame. Don't hoodoo your girlfriends if you don't want them obsessing over you! D'uh! First rule of hoodoo, if hoodoo has any rules. Maybe I should make some up so this doesn't keep happening to other unfortunate lovelorn maids.) The irony is that Hoodoo Head is one of those skeptical humanists, or "brights" or whatever they call themselves these days, in the mold of Dawkins and Hitchens, so he would never even believe that he had put a curse on me. I am too decent a human being to curse him back; all I want now is to find out how to break this curse. (Hopefully it is not as powerful as the Curse of the Bambino, or, God forbid, the Curse of the Billy Goat! Right, Hardingfele? Look for the Cubbies to take the pennant in 2035 if it lasts as long as the Curse of the Bambino.) So does anyone know how to reverse hoodoo curses? If I'd only known, I could have asked around down in New Orleans.

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Curses!

A true story: the little voodoo doll I brought back from New Orleans for my bunnysitter was to help with her career, and right away she got another job. Now everyone wants to borrow it!

Do curses work? When I told the story of the voodoo doll to a friend, she said she and a coworker once put a curse on another coworker they disliked intensely. They just did it for a joke, but she immediately broke her ankle and missed a week of work. Another friend tells me that his father once cursed someone, and the person died in a plane crash not long after that. His father (who was prominently featured in The Godfather II) resolved never to curse anyone again. 

I am not talking about vulgar language. The F-word is so overused that it hardly means anything. It is just an adjective people throw around carelessly. The S-word, which comes from an Anglo-Saxon word for diarrhea, is just as vulgar and overused. (Nobody seems to definitively know where the F-word comes from, but one guess is the imperative for "to do" in Latin, which is fac.) True cursing involves holy persons, sacrilege, and a stated hope that some harm befalls the cursed person. People might not think about what they are saying when they say, "G** d*** you!" but they are actually wishing for your eternal damnation. Obviously this upsets God a lot more than using the F-word; I don't know what He thinks about that, but I will go out on a limb and say He isn't fond of people asking Him to send other people to Hell just because they cut them off in traffic.

In my experience, Europeans (at least in Spain, France, Greece and especially Italy) swear this way much more often than Americans. We are not very original with our cursing while they have some truly colorful phrases that I will not repeat. (The most shocking one is something my father once told me, a Sicilian phrase that involves fornication and the Virgin Mary.) I am not sure why American culture never got into true cursing as much, but that is just as well. I have a bit of a temper and am glad my first impulse when angry is to drop the F-bomb rather than wishing some enormous harm upon the object of my anger down to the fifth generation. Because, judging from the stories above, you just might get what you wish for!

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