Oh Snow!

I am irrationally superstitious regarding the effect that my actions have upon entirely unrelated future events.

To this day, I blame a close friend for the Cubs’ downfall in the 2003 NLCS because he stepped away from the tiny television screen we were glued to as the foul ball was touched by a certain fan.  I apparently thought that his laser focused gaze would have traveled through said screen and into the stadium where it would have created a mentally generated force field keeping the ball from being touched and allowing Moises Alou to catch it for the out.

Similarly, I blame my fellow Bears fans for the Green Bay Packers’ Super Bowl victory in February of 2011.  While attending the Divisional Playoff game against Seattle a week before meeting up with Green Bay in the NFC Championship, when the game was obviously in hand, many in attendance began chanting, “Green Bay sucks!”  Despite my avid protests over the bad juju it would most certainly create, my lone voice of reason was not enough to turn the tide of 30,000+ screaming fans and the chant repeated itself throughout the rest of the game.  Although my head knows better, in my heart I still believe that Jay Cutler’s injury, the Bears’ loss in the following week and the Packers’ eventual Super Bowl win was a direct result of the damaged karma on that day.

It is this irrational fear of my role in the butterfly effect that prevents me from calling attention to things that I believe to be completely ridiculous until almost all likelihood of karmic retribution has passed.  Now that we are a few days into March and, I feel, a safe distance has been created between we residents of Chicago and the depths of winter, the time has come for me to call foul over a so-called long term meteorologist’s claim that this winter would be one of the worst in Chicago’s history.

“People in Chicago are going to want to move after this winter,” the meteorologist was quoted saying to NBC5 Chicago.  I recall thinking to myself that such claims were impossible to predict.  I wondered how this guy could be so confident about what the weather would be months ahead of time while other meteorologists couldn’t accurately predict what was to happen two hours from now.

(On a side note, I feel meteorologists in general need to attend remedial math classes, specifically to learn the finer points of percentages.  When I look at the forecast and see there is a 100% chance of rain next hour, that is an absolute guarantee that it will rain.  Similarly, when there is a 0% chance, I should be able to take an hour-long nap and not have to worry about the mound of sugar cubes I left out in my backyard dissolving in the oncoming precipitation.  I don’t often leave sugar cubes out while I nap, but under those circumstance, I SHOULD BE ABLE TO!)

Instead, we here in the Second City have experienced one of the mildest winters in recent memory.  I can count on one hand the number of times snow fell and actually stuck to the ground and I can count with no hands how many times that snow was still on the ground a week later.

So the time has come for me to comfortably say, “Ha!  In your face, long term meteorologist!  Shows how much you know.”

Attention:  All residents of the Chicago-land area should secure canned goods and provisions and get inside immediately as unseasonably cold temperatures and three feet of snowfall are imminent.