I blame House and the skin cancer unit in 12th grade health class--particularly the disturbing afternoon we spent staring at images of cancerous spots projected onto the whiteboard--for instilling in me the fear of leaving my house without a Hazmat suit. I've lost count of how many times I've fired up the Google for a refresher course on the ABCs of melanoma. It's like a twisted nursery rhyme, and I'm convinced that by the time I have children I'll have found enough cancer warning signs to finish the rest of the alphabet.
I'm what you might call a half-ass hypochondriac. Usually I'm just testing out the terms on my tongue and don't really believe I am under their influence. On those occasions when I'm truly concerned, as has been the case with numerous would-be cavities that weren't, I sink into a deep funk for several hours or several days until my mom reassures me that I in fact do not suffer from multiple personality disorder.
All this is just to say that I'm aware of my utter freakdom. I know I don't have Lyme disease (anymore), and it's okay if the mole on my leg might be cancerous because I'm sure the mole on my face is, and that one will probably kill me faster.
But I also know that my most recent non-medical ailment is a violent case of soccer-related anger management issues. Once, and I'm not proud of this--okay, maybe I'm a little bit proud, in that I've-decided-it's-okay-to-be-an-awful-person-during-indoor-soccer way--I smashed into the other team's goalie after she had caught the ball and kicked it toward the other end of the field. I have illegally slide-tackled a girl from behind just because we only had 14 seconds left in the game and I hadn't gotten out all my aggression. I've slammed people up against the plexiglass walls in pursuit of the ball. (In my defense, though, that's an established and oft-used indoor soccer strategy.)
But no matter how angry I may get when I'm on the field, nothing curdles my blood or draws resentment and bitterness more than any player who scores against my Seattle Sounders. I consider it an offense punishable by death. Unfortunately, I can only administer the death glare, complete with lip snarl, and I doubt David Beckham can see this from the field. (He's too busy being aggravatingly beautiful.) But each person who sneaks a ball past the fingertips of the godlike Kasey Keller has earned himself a spot at the top of my hit list. At the end of last season when the Sounders were getting their tushes thoroughly kicked by LA, I was so irate that they wouldn't have a shot at the championship that I had to leave the TV room at halftime to go for a walk around the block. In the pouring rain. Cue a montage of angry men smashing empty beer cans into their foreheads while the depressed little pill from the Zoloft commercial floats by in the background, crying.
That this rage is so intense is a shock to me, the rageful. I seldom experience ire on such a scale in my everyday life. The maddest I've gotten in recent memory was when I started a book that should have only taken me two days to read but was so hard to follow that I barely finished it in five. It is because of the extremely specific, extremely violent bouts of anger during soccer games that I have diagnosed myself with anger management issues.
First order of business: Beckham voodoo doll.
No comments:
Post a Comment