Happy Valentine's Day, everyone. In case you were wondering, the file name for this page has absolutely nothing to do with Winnipeg Jets goaltender Tim Cheveldae. Well, that's not true, but the file has nothing to do with Tim Cheveldae. It just sounds a little like "File Day".

When I originally decided to replace frames.html as my current File Of The Day, which was on Saturday, 03 February, I had planned to produce a big semi-public lamentation file, which I had hoped no one (at least, no one I mentioned) would read. Some of that is still going to come out in this file, but there is more than that to be said now.

"You city folk...you worry about a lot of shit, don't you?" --Jack Palance's character, Curly, from City Slickers

I do worry about a lot of meaningless drivel, I guess. I look back on my entries on the daythink page for last week:

I see a pattern here. Like I said at the top of the file, I had originally planned to make this a big griping file (not to be confused with a big groping file, which would be something else). Since Saturday, though, it has returned to my attention that a lot of people have a lot more problems than I do. On SportsCenter this morning I watched the segment on Travis Roy for the third time. That really freaks me out when I see that; his dream was to play Division I hockey, and he realized that dream--for 11 seconds. Now he is a quadreplegic, after 11 seconds. Think about that. Put yourself in the Terriers' #24 jersey. The puck drops at center ice. Zero. The Terriers win the face off. One. Two. The right defenseman brings the puck forward. Three. Four. He passes it to you, the right winger. Five. You enter the zone. Six. Seven. You deke the North Dakota defender. Eight. You swerve to miss a check. Nine. The puck leaves your stick. Ten. You fall towards the corner boards. Eleven. By the time the twelfth second ticks off the clock, you have left the ice for the last time on skates. It makes my problems seem very insignificant that a hockey player in New England has a white spot the size of a pencil eraser on his MRI which prevents him not only from helping his team on the ice in the Beanpot tournament this week, but from even moving his feet. But such, in its weird way, is life.

That problem might seem off in the distance. I mean, really, how does one missed check affect my life. Okay, fine. You want a problem closer to home? My friend Angela called me on Wednesday. She told me that her best friend was still in the hospital for some psychiatric instability, on the order of voices and hallucinations. That's pretty severe stuff. Again, you may claim that it affects a person I have never met. But put yourself in Angela's clothes. (She occasionally borrows some of mine, so I can do this.) You've just found out that your best friend is being hospitalized for a psychiatric disturbance, and the doctors suspect some sort of physiological causation for this problem. How would that make you feel? I told her that I had tried to imagine a similar situation to put myself in so I could attempt to discern how she felt. She told me what I had already figured out: to imagine my best friend, Mara, in the same situation as her best friend, Allison. I did that, and I didn't like it. As I phrased it, if anything "severe" ever happened to Mara, I would be devastated. Personally, under the circumstances, I thought Angela was holding up extremely well, i.e., better than I would have been.

My chief problems pale in intensity in comparison, which I suppose is a good thing. Sometimes, though, I get so focused on my own little dilemmas that I miss the boat on what is really important. I said in death.html: "I have learned, I think, as has my father before me, that there are too many important things in life to let something stupid get in the way." Sometimes, though, I think I haven't learned this yet. I was upset with Angela last weekend, upset to the point that I wouldn't return her phone calls on Sunday. I was not upset for a valid reason; indeed, I was mad at her for things a) which I had no right to be mad at her about and b) which she should have done, irrespective of how I would react. Almost all my friends are younger than I am (whether by 20 days or 364), yet it can hardly be said that they are less mature. Many times I think I am being more mature about an issue than some of my friends, but there exist as well times when I disagree. I can whine and complain all I want about this, that, and the other, about the fact that I sit around the dorm all day, about the fact that I don't have a girlfriend, and about the fact that I miss my friends. But whining and complaining doesn't change the situation, and in most cases, rectifying the situation is probably not really what I want if I don't go out and do something to rectify it.

"It doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Someday you'll understand that."--Humphrey Bogart, as Rick, in Casablanca
Jason Elliot Benda -- 11 February 1996 -- 01:18 CST
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