First Monday, a Massage, and a Malt

Back to work.  Both jobs.  By the way, for anyone who doesn't already know me, allow me to introduce myself.  My name is of course Dave.  I manage an 800 seat performing arts center that is a restored 1927 vaudeville and silent movie palace.  I am also a morning DJ for an oldies station that is in the old theatre.  Other sidelines include working as a ventriloquist, magician and mobile DJ.  So as you can see a lot of my work involves speaking and all of it involves dealing with people, lots of people, all sorts of people.  My wife, Lori is a kindergarten teacher and we have two children, Emily 15, and Dawson 10.  So now you know a little bit more about this man trying to say nothing negative about anyone ever.  We have auditions tonight for a children's musical at the theatre that my wife is directing.  At 1:00 this afternoon my wife and I treated ourselves each to an hour long massage to get us ready for the coming year and in my case to help relieve any stress so that I could better focus on saying nothing negative about anyone ever.  I left the massage completely relaxed and stress free.  I was confident that I had discovered a wonderful tool that would help me in my quest.  I even thought about scheduling a massage once a week as a reward if I could make it a week without saying anything negative about anyone.  Yes!  I thought, this is the ticket.  I'm on the right road now, nothing can stop me.  It wasn't even an hour after the massage that I made my first negative statement of the day!  My wife and I went and picked up our kids to take them to lunch.  The kids started fighting in the car as I backed out of the driveway.  No problem.  I calmly pulled back into the driveway and quietly announced that I had decided to just get lunch on my own and hurry back to work.  Of course this made both kids promise to stop fighting and be on their best behavior if the family could only PLEASE have lunch together.  After all in a couple of days they will all be back in school and lunch together on a weekday will be out of the question.  So, assured that the rest of the lunch would be stress free we took off for Chili's.  While waiting for our lunch to arrive I sat sipping my Coke Zero when my son offered me a bite of his chocolate malt that he had been bragging about, so of course I took a bite... a big bite... and then... I got a BIG brain freeze.  I removed my glasses and began rubbing my eyes waiting for the pain to subside when my wife said "What's wrong?"  I replied, "That stupid malt gave me a brain freeze!"  My daughter jumped into action pointing at me laughing and announcing loud enough for the tables around us to hear, "That is NEGATIVE!"  I admitted she was right, but then my wife, who is being very supportive came to my rescue.  She said, "A malt is not a person, and Dad's resolution is to not say anything negative about anyone ever."  I thought I was home free for a nano-second until my wife went on to reason aloud, "Of course if a malt isn't a person, it can't be stupid, so the comment goes back on yourself for taking the big bite, so that was being negative about yourself."  I said, "Ok, noted.  I slipped up in a moment of pain brought on by a chocolate malt."  And so it is that I left Chili's a wiser soul with a new area for me to watch out for, comments made while experiencing physical pain.  I have a feeling that in the coming days, the malt incident will seem minor to new challenges I will face.  Stupid malt!