Oops, I Meant To Go The Other Way

Thursday the 17th, aside from being my mother’s birthday and the anniversary of the day Disneyland opened in 1955, is Wrong Way Corrigan Day. I wasn’t really sure what that was about, so I took to the fastidious research that got me through college with all ‘C’ grades. Actually, I got mostly A’s in college, but it kinda cramps my ‘I’m An Idiot and No One Argues That Fact’ style. If I walked around telling everyone I was an ‘A’ student in college, they might expect more of me and that goes against years of trying to lower everyone’s expectations of me so that I have more time for important things like napping and teaching my retriever Mabel to actually go retrieve something.

I read the name Corrigan and it makes me think of corrugated, which really has no impact upon this story at all, but I wanted to get it off my chest. I really do feel a lighter load now. My fastidious research, also known as ‘googling’ and ‘wikipediaing,’ gave me a great explanation of Douglas Corrigan and a little ‘accidental’ trip he took long ago in the days before TiVo, cell phones, GPS receivers and deep fried twinkies. In the late ‘30s, Corrigan flew from Southern California to New York and then was trying to fly back to So Cal. The only thing is that he ended up landing in Ireland instead. He blamed weather and fog and stuff for getting him all turned around. And that’s a little fact not to be overlooked here. I can guarantee you that the next time I go the wrong way and am getting grief about it that I will be blaming weather and stuff. Heck, I might use that excuse just to come in to work late some day. ‘I swear, I swear, the smog got me all turned around and I took the wrong freeway and didn’t realize it until I had reached Needles. Aren’t you impressed though that I persevered through all of that and still showed up to do my job and set a good example for the rest of my coworkers?’

Other than commemorating the day of his landing in Ireland, I am not sure what we are actually supposed to do on Wrong Way Corrigan Day. My first temptation is to go drive backwards down a street close to home honking and yelling something like ‘Long Live Doug Corrigan – the man who made backasswards cool!’ However, there are legal ramifications to this, not to mention safety concerns and insurance rates to think about it. Then there’s the fact that I don’t know Douglas Corrigan well enough to call him Doug, possibly because he died before I was born. Plus, if I yelled anything like that anywhere near my home, my family would change the locks. My poor family is already looked down upon by our neighbors because of my propensity to crank up the Barry Manilow while grilling on the patio or laying in my hammock, so they really don’t need the further shame that my little backwards Corrigan parade would cause.

Fortunately we have portable GPS devices these days to prevent backwarding. Well, assuming one actually follows the GPS device’s directions. Thinking that I was born with a reliable sense of inner-navigation and bearings, I tend to doubt the leadership that my GPS device seems so willing to give me. Its female voice is so pleasant and reassuring and confident that you just get the feeling it knows exactly where it is at any time and how to safely and quickly get you where you want to go. The only problem is that sometimes the direction my device wants to send me just doesn’t ‘feel’ right. No, I am not a Jedi, but I do tend to trust my feelings. It’s not really a ‘force’ as much as a notion that I need to go in the opposite direction I am being told to go. I am slowly overcoming this. Perhaps I would have built my trust and reliance in my GLAD (Getting Lost Avoidance Device) a little quicker if it had been programmed to call me a ‘dumb ass’ or ‘chemical byproduct of cow feces’ whenever I didn’t listen to the device’s directions.

So, despite the fact that I have just shared 4 paragraphs of completely useless information, enjoy your Wrong Way Corrigan Day. I trust you will celebrate it however, you see fit. But I’ve got dibs on the yelling and honking!

And while I’m giving you the Questionable Holiday 411 (to sound like the cool kids – did it work?), Friday is Wiener Day. Wiener Day commemorates the day the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile was unveiled. Does anyone younger than 80 still call hot dogs wieners? I mean there’s Wienershnitzel, but that’s a definition for a breaded veal cutlet (did that impress you? The internet rules!). Can you tell that I am continuing this post just so that I can type wiener? Wieners, wieners, wieners. There, it’s outta my system. WIENERS! Oops, I guess it’s not.