Castles in the air

Yesterday, the great Maven commented that Dr Richard Wiseman, University of Hertfordshire, says: lucky people are �skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.� I�m thinking of this today, having moments ago hung up the phone with Grady, the Mac repairman working on my ailing laptop. Actually, I was thinking of it while I was on the phone with him, and he was telling me about all the many, many files that he can�t get off my old hard drive. It was rather too late for positive expectations on that front, but a resilient attitude seemed the best recourse, and so I told him that was fine, and that I�d appreciate whatever files he could transfer, but nothing really crucial was at stake.

Because second-guessing is my primary hobby, after I put the phone back in place, I started questioning my statement. It�s true that nothing crucial exists on the old hard drive of my laptop, but there are lots of things I�d like to have back. All my music, for instance. Of course, by not listening to my intuition (�Hey, Violet�you might want to back up all that music you love so much. P.S. You look hot in those new corduroys!�) I�ve created my own bad luck, and so I guess I�ll just put that in my hard drive and crash it. Onward and upward, I say, moving on to the next opportunity.

As it happens, the front page of the Life section of our deathly daily paper carries an article on an important emerging trend, notice of which also happened appeared on the front Life section page two years ago. This trend is taking a long time to emerge. What is the trend? Why, cupcakes, of course! Beautiful, beautiful cupcakes! Two years ago, I wrote this about that:

10:21 a.m. September 30, 2004
In which I am alerted to a craze

This morning�s paper contains an article highlighting the ways in which the sudden popularity of cupcakes is sweeping the nation. According to the headline, cupcakes are causing �a sweet uproar,� so thank God I read the paper today, or I�d be chalking up �cupcakes� as another great fad I let pass me by, along with the popularity of Cosmopolitans and the phrase �24-7.�

Fascinating as the subject of cupcakes is, I found myself drifting off after a couple of paragraphs, but I did learn the following interesting facts, which I will share with you now:

  1. Cupcake mania began in New York;

  2. Cupcakes are carving out a �Seattle-style� niche;

  3. Cupcakes make children giggle with delight;

  4. �If we consume several cupcakes and doughnuts all day, every day for a year, bad things start happening;� and that is a direct quote from the director for the Center for Public Health Nutrition at the University of Washington, so you know it�s true;

  5. Certain people became so incensed at the gall exhibited by Gourmet magazine in featuring a cupcake on the cover, that they cancelled their subscriptions.

[Note: That entry also contained some accurate, yet snarkily worded, observations about someone I later became concerned might discover it, so I hid it in my �private� folder. Wow.]

I haven�t given cupcakes much thought since then (failure to identify opportunity!), but it seems I�ve been given another chance to get in on this trend as it �sweeps the country,� according to today�s paper. Two years of sweeping seems remarkably slow, but perhaps that initial article was meant to serve as a warning, so that the Great Cupcake Sweep of 2006 wouldn�t send us all into heart attacks of shock.

Suffice it to say that I will not miss out on this round of the trend. �Santa Barbara,� states the article, �is on the radar to become one of the next premier cupcake towns.� I will not sidetrack myself with visions of a giant sugar-cube castle frosted in lavender swirls, atop which a taffy radar antenna spins, searching for signs of cupcakes. �We have a cupcake contact bearing 323 degrees from Candy Cane Lane!�

[Note: When I called the Keelhauler to find out the correct wording of that sentence, he advised me to consult a chart in order to get the proper bearing, as in �Well, it�s not just going to be 323 degrees. That was just a random number. You have to figure out the actual bearing. For example, if Candy Cane Lane is east of Santa Barbara, then it bears 90 degrees from you. Just think about that for a second. You need to find out where the cupcake factory is, and then figure out what the bearing is.� He then advised me to get a map. I tried to explain that Candy Cane Lane is fictional, and that there is not actually some �cupcake factory� with a radar antenna, but he was lost in Explanationland and failed to hear me. He continued, �I think something needs to be said about the relative importance of Santa Barbara that it is even being considered. For example, what other town could be in line for cupcake prominence? Not the southwest, obviously. Seattle has coffee. Boston has baked beans. Maybe somewhere in South Carolina.�]

And so it is now obvious that not only have I sidetracked myself with thoughts of cupcake castles, I have also allowed myself to be sidetracked by the insistence of the Keelhauler that my fantasies bear serious consideration and the assistance of a compass.

And� Resilience. Focusing on resilience.

P.S.


Meet the Ultra Violet cupcake, courtesy of Cupcake Royale, of Seattle. I like the turn this trend is taking (i.e., Violetcentric). Thank you, dear Ms. Cloudy.



Star of the day. . .Don MacLean
posted @ 10:20 p.m. on September 21, 2006 before | after

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She lay awake all night,

zzzzzzzzzzz......