The Professor's Classroom #115: Life Happens
Submitted by The Professor on Friday, October 18, 2002 at 11:00 AM EST





There’s an old saying, class – “Life is what happens when you’ve made other plans.” Certainly the faculty here at PIN (Powerbomb Institute of the Net) is not immune to reality, least of all your Professor. My absence from the classroom the past few weeks has been due to the fact that reality came crashing down upon me one fine day.

A few weeks ago, my father (who lives with me) suffered a stroke which paralyzed him on one side. His thinking capacity was affected, too – one day when I went in to see him, he had no idea who I was or why I was there. He has improved over the last few weeks, but is always going to be partially paralyzed and will need round-the-clock care in order to live at home. (I refuse to send him to a nursing home until there is no other option.)

My wife and I, fortunately, have been able to arrange our work schedules so that one of us will be home at all times. Meanwhile, arrangements must be made for ramps, wheelchairs, etc. that my father will need. My father is the only member of my immediate family remaining (I lost my mother to cancer and my brother to a heart attack some years ago), and he WILL have whatever he needs.

Meanwhile, I have spent every available moment at the hospital with my father. When we finally get him home, he is priority one. I will have to be one of his chief nurses, a job that I welcome. I owe this man a debt that I cannot possibly repay.

So, I need to prioritize what I’m doing. I must make the most out of what time I have available. So, what about professional wrestling? The fact is, when the Un-Americans started their upside-down flag bit, I quit watching Raw. I haven’t seen it since. (Please, no emails—you know how I feel, and you won’t change it.) As I’ve stated before, they have every right to do it, and I have every right to not watch it. (I did glance at the web reports on Raw this week—looks like they found something even more shameful.)

Last night, I saw about 30 minutes of Smackdown, the first time I’ve been able to watch any of it in two weeks. I didn’t buy the last WWE pay-per-view (and judging from the reports, it would have been a waste of my money anyway), and I won’t be buying this one—I’m just not interested enough to shell out 35 dollars.

As for NWA-TNA...unfortunately, I’m a fan of NBC’s The West Wing, which I consider to be the best-written show on TV. Since I live in the Eastern Time Zone, it comes on at the same time as TNA. Sorry, TNA -- The West Wing is consistently excellent, and it’s free. You lose on both counts.

The bottom line: professional wrestling has dropped off my list of priorities. I can still enjoy it on occasion, when they finally get around to wrestling, but it is no longer important to me to watch religiously every week. And so, if I’m really no longer passionate about wrestling, and not watching on a regular basis, and cannot write on a regular schedule as I promised the webmaster I would, with the quality that I demand from myself, should I be occupying a space on this fine web site?

The answer, I think, is obvious.

God, my wife, my kids, my father, my work, and my other businesses are my priorities. Wrestling is down there somewhere underneath having my dental checkups and changing the oil in my car.

I thank you for joining me in the Classroom, and for sharing your opinion with me, whether you agreed with me or not. And I thank the webmaster of this fine site for allowing me to occupy his bandwidth every week. We’ve had a two-year-plus run, outlasting many Internet columns and wrestling sites. Your Professor departs with two paraphrased/adapted quotes – the first, I think, is an old proverb; the second is from journalist Linda Ellerbee.

“Don’t be sad because it’s over—be glad because it happened.”

This is the 115th edition of The Professor’s Classroom. There will be no more.

And so it goes.

Class dismissed.

- The Professor -









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