That Could Have Been Me! But Not Really.

Did you all have a nice Labor Day Weekend?

Good. Now, let's talk about me and how I almost died.

My friend Erin drove into Sacramento on Saturday with her mom to lollygagging around the State Fair for a few hours. They swung by our house afterward and we all hit Dos Coyotes for a late lunch. You know, the place with the decapitated head that I told you about last month?

The next day, a car drove through the restaurant. I couldn't embed the video news clip, so you'll have to click on the picture below if you want to watch it on Sacramento's Channel 13 news site.

The table where we sat was right about where that car's trunk is in the picture. WE COULD HAVE DIED!

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Did you see what I did there? I gave that story way more meaning to my personal circumstances than was necessary in order to create a lot of drama. Not to mention a lot of attention and sympathy toward myself, which was completely unnecessary and undeserved.

Why do we do that? How many times have you or someone you know said things comparable to, "I almost took the cruise that hit the iceberg. That could have been me!" or, "Oh my God, I was on a Zeppelin flight just last week. That could have been me!"

There must be some psychological term for it, but I don't know what it is, so I'm calling out to all my Psych major people to tell me what it is. In the meantime, I will call it Manufacturing Fate Where It Doesn't Exist, or M-FWIDE, for short.

I knew someone who suffered from M-FWIDE. She managed to connect every single reported disaster to herself. The news would report a hurricane clear on the other side of the country and I would wait, and sure enough, she could still pull out something like, "We thought about going there for our vacation. Boy, it's a good thing we didn't. That could have been me!"

Are we actually impressing our friends when we brag about the coincidences in our lives? I mean, did you really think, "Holy Cow, Nanny Goats was sitting in the exact same place where that car is! That's SO amazing! She's lucky to be alive!" And then you go around telling all your friends that we're BFFs, so that they will be impressed that you're really really close to the person who almost got nailed by three thousand pounds of Volkswagen?

Really?

OK then, did I ever tell you about the time I flew on the American Airlines flight from L.A. to Chicago ON THE SAME DAY AS BUT THE FLIGHT PRIOR TO the one that O.J. Simpson took from L.A. to Chicago the night his ex-wife was murdered? Oh yeah. Totally true story.

P.S. If you didn't get enough car-crashing-into-Sacramento-restaurants news, you can read or watch a story about someone who drove into a Starbucks, also on Sunday.