At any rate, I love romantic comedies, but I especially loved this
one. Not only is it well done, but it answers the question that all of
us want to know after ending any bad relationship, “Did we do the right
thing? Were they a catch or not?” I think it’s normal to wonder, I just
think it’s more important to remember what we say in Appalachia, “Simply
because you can catch something doesn’t make it good. Loads of people
catch Syphilis, that doesn’t mean you want it for life.”

That said, I genuinely have *no* idea why Southwestern Pennsylvanians have a colloquialism about venereal disease.

However… I do understand why we say, “You can never go home
again.” Heraclitus said it thousands of years before us. He just said it
more eloquently, “No man stands in the same river twice. The man is not
the same, and neither is the water.” And who am I to argue with him…
especially when he’s right. You get older. You get wiser. Hell, you get
back fat, but you are not the same person – and neither is anyone else. And just like Meryl Streep, this year my best friend, TB, and I painfully discovered that nostalgia isn’t what it used to be.

You see, every winter, TB and I
take an annual ski trip out West. We’re pretty hard-core skiers who have
been lucky enough to do some of the best resorts in the world. And this
year, we decided to head to Colorado again. Now, even
though I went to college out West and spent more than one Spring Break
at Keystone, I’d not skied that specific mountain for almost 20 years,
and it was interesting to see how much both of us had changed. We’ve
both gotten much bigger, we both make more money, and neither of us
seems to attract college kids anymore. In other words… we’ve grown up.
And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. At thirty-eight, I no longer
party like a rock star, smoke like a chimney, or swear like a sailor…
which is good. Unfortunately, I also no longer ski like I’m in a Warren
Miller movie or believe that bathing suits are optional. In fact, not
only are they required, they’re required to have a skirt.

Anyway… every year on these
trips, we try something we’ve never done before, something to make us
believe that we’re still young and fun: dogsled racing, ziplining,
indoor sky diving, etc. And this year we tried snow biking, a sport
which is only popular with people who don’t believe that skiing and
snowboarding are lethal enough.
So there we were, at the top of a mountain, signing waivers… when I
heard myself say, “Self… how bad could it be?” And instead of saying,
“Bad, really-really bad,” I heard Mae West instead, “When choosing
between two evils, try the one you’ve never tried before.” So instead of
skiing. We did it. We went snow biking, and we had a BLAST! That said, I
will tell you, I stood at the top of a snow-covered mountain… on a
bike that had skis for tires… a flag on the back for visability… and
a bucket on the handlebars for my gear… and I thought to myself, “Oh
sweet Jesus… I’m going to go to hell in the handbasket on the front of
this damn thing. The irony.”

But that’s not the point.

The point is that Meryl Streep’s character heard Mae West, too, “Try
the guy you’ve never tried before…” because relationships are like
snow biking, and I don’t mean that your crotch hurts if you hit a bump. I
mean that, if you only do what you know, you can miss out on a having a
truly wonderful time.