Woohoo! This past Saturday we moved into a new domicile! Here are some random shots from The Big Day.

The front of the house.

Saying goodbye to the old place.

My friend Laurie came by to watch Zooey.

Mike and Maddi occupying themselves with my Guitar Hero: Metallica game, while their dad helps unload the truck.

View of the dining area and kitchen. We will be painting the walls a lighter color as soon as we get a chance.

Living room. Sorry for the clutter, but it IS moving day.

Zooey entertaining herself with her laptop.

Master bathroom.

This is the view from our bathroom window.

This little staircase takes you up and out to the patio/back yard area. We're planning on using it as a decontamination zone for when Zooey gets big enough to make mud angels in the yard.

I love this yard! However, Nick and I have spent the past several afternoons mowing, edging, ripping dead plants out of the garden, etc., and I have come to a conclusion. Yard. Work. Sucks.

Back view of house with patio for grillin' and such.

Here's Zooey in her new room, sitting in the rocking chair her dad used when he was a baby.

Zooey's bathroom.

Check out that bookshelf. My God, it's full of...dust!

Here's a shot of Zooey's ladybug room. The gorgeous quilt on the side of the crib was made for her by my Aunt Sally. And yes, those ARE movie posters on the wall (A Clockwork Orange and The Rocky Horror Picture Show, respectively). Is that weird?

The other side of the ladybug room.

First night in the new house! Zooey seems to be a tad excited about her new room.

As the title indicates, here's a collection of random photos taken over the past few weeks.

First up is my latest project, the Octopus's Garden jacket. I used green and white damask fabric and cut out an octopus shape that I had drawn out. I then applied fusible web paper to the back, heated it until it was attached, and stitched it all on with light blue contrast thread. And added button eyes, natch.

I love this picture of Zooey playing with her daddy.

Mere moments after this photo was taken, the truck unhinged its jaw and devoured the little sedan beside it. Seriously.

"Oh noes! More pictures of me!"

Cute baby, cute dress, nuff said.

I ordered this charm on Etsy (an online crafts bazaar). Remember the evil robot Maximilian from Disney's "The Black Hole"? This is him! Isn't he the coolest?

And last but not least, more Tummy Time!

Here's Zooey "enjoying" her first ever parade. (Don't worry, we put the canopy back over her as soon as the picture was taken. Two weeks is a bit early for a first sunburn, and anyway you know how those newborns can be real divas when it comes to their skin.)

This float wins the cookie! Behold, a worthy tribute to one of my favorite movies of all time.

What do these guys do? Apparently they scoop poop.

In case you can't tell, these young women are doing the "Thriller" dance in full zombie regalia.

Kids on unicycles!

Here's Dorothy, looking a bit mannish.

This parade brought to you by...um...green paint.

Asteroid Head Art Club. Why do these guys make me think of "City of Lost Children"?

Asteroid head up close.

Still more asteroid heads, with wagon.

And speaking of artistic expression, here's an original design of Zooey's. The subject matter is unconventional (a bird, maybe?), and you may notice she has used spit-up as a medium. That's our clever girl.

One day I went outside, absolutely convinced that there was some kind of decomposing plant matter nearby. I could smell it everywhere, pungent and rotten-smelling. But when I dragged Nick out to verify it, he wasn't able to smell anything at all.

I don't know how it's possible to be this overheated all of the time. Sometimes my face feels like the Nazis at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

So my body is building a home for the baby, and it's apparently doing it 24/7 based on the symptoms I've been experiencing. Don't they have unions in the uterus? Seriously. Someone's getting overworked.

Flavors are all wrong. I also have a terrible aftertaste following every meal, drink, or snack. What's with that? It's like I taste every flavor, and then I taste the haunted carnival version of the flavor. It's the same basic taste, but all sinister and unpleasant.

Wouldn't it be cool if there were educational tapes and videos that you could use to teach the baby about the world while it was still in the womb? You know, like in Superman.

I have some great news, dear Readers. There appears to be a living thing in my belly, and it's not a tapeworm. It's a miniature person! More info and observations to come, but briefly:

I'm just past the 14-week mark, which puts my due date at March 3rd of next year.

I've had quite enough of the morning sickness, thank you very much.

We heard the baby's heartbeat today, and it was really fast, kind of like techno music. Very cool. Incidentally, the ambient noise from the sonography makes it sound like you're in a submarine, waiting for the depth charges to drop.

Oh, and you may have noticed that there's a new feature on the sidebar of my blog. It's a week-by-week pregnancy tracker, and you can toggle through it by using the right and left arrows. Neat, huh? We'll do our best to keep it updated, and by the end there should be enough pictures so that you can cycle through really fast and make the whole pregnancy look like a freaky stop-motion video. (Think Gumby.)

I've recently read some pretty cool books. (Thanks, Brandi, for letting me borrow them!) They include:

Lunar Park, by Bret Easton Ellis. I suppose this would be categorized as . . . uh . . . autobiographical fiction? The author is the narrator in this book, but the story quickly takes a turn for the fantastic, incorporating ghosts and Patrick Bateman (the lead character from American Psycho, which Ellis also wrote) and stuffed animals that have been possessed by demonic forces. It's a strange, riveting story about the things that haunt us. And there were times when it scared the living crap out of me.

The Alienist, by Caleb Carr. This is a wonderful piece of historical mystery fiction. It takes place in late 19th century New York City, and involves a small group of people who employ a new-fangled practice called 'forensics' in their efforts to find a serial killer. It's really a fascinating peek into another era. Bonus: Teddy Roosevelt is a character.

Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro. Wow, this one was a doozy. A beautiful story about a group of children attending a special school. I can't say much more . . . half the fun of this book is discovering what's really going on with these kids. But I can tell you that the story is elegantly written, unflinching, and more than a little heartbreaking.

Other Random Stuff on my Mind:

1. I now have a gorgeous framed poster of There Will Be Blood hanging on my wall. Interior decorators of the world, I drink your milkshake!
2. I just don't understand this Sarah Palin thing. Does McCain really believe that Hillary supporters will rally around his VP pick when the woman is pretty much the ideological opposite of Clinton herself? Does he believe women are so irrational? Are we now, perhaps, going to be prescribed radical shock therapy for our troublesome Victorian hysteria?
3. Check out this trippy piece of retro fabulism. I've been listening to it all week.
4. Did you ever notice that those Halloween costume stores seem to spring up overnight? You wake up one morning and there they are, fully stocked, with their ancient Bill Clinton masks and their sexy nurse costumes. No one ever sees them bringing trucks up to the door. No one sees the workers through the windows busily stocking the shelves. The stores just materialize out of thin air. Then, when the first day of November rolls around, they disappear back into the haze again. It's pretty creepy if you think about it. Like if Brigadoon were a horror movie.

Just thought I'd post a few pictures of the newest item Nick has knitted for me--a drawstring chemise top with lace sections. It took him a while, but I think it turned out beautifully.

Below: Alas, the stress of posing was too much for me, as evidenced by my Swooning Victorian Heroine posture. But don't you fret. A couple of hippies stopped by with some smelling salts, and it all turned out fine.

So Nick and I were downtown this weekend, and we happened upon this freaky car show and parade. My guess is that there weren't any rules dictating car design . . . you just had to make it as unusual and distinctive as possible. Take a gander at some of the entries.

Can you see the license plate? It says "I'd rather be living."

Yes. The car is covered with an assortment of beauty items. And check it out: this is not the only vehicle with a head on it.

This car is upholstered. And it has boxing gloves. And a torch on the top. And a working fountain.

This is one of my favorites. The mosaic stuff is very intricate, but it still has a randomness about it that appeals to me.

This is the super-creepy steering wheel of the same car.

And this is a message written on its bumper.

I love this one. And best of all, there was actually an enormous cake on the back that was being served to passersby.

From the blue ribbon, I'm guessing this won first prize. And yes, those are pennies glued to the side of it.

Here's one of the more unorthodox vehicles.

Decorated exclusively with bottle caps.

The ornamentation on this one is one part pvc pipe and two parts computer keyboard keys.

I'm not sure if you can tell, but the dragon effect was created by tire strips. This is why I love Lawrence.

Hey again, silly-muffins. I know I've been MIA for quite a while (and for that I apologize), but I've been doing lots of secret agent stuff lately and I just haven't had a minute to myself. I hope to do better in the near future. For my first foray back into Blogland, I thought I'd post some examples of Nick's recent knitted projects. Biff! Bam! Zowie! It's like having my own personal sweatshop.

(DISCLAIMER: This is not an article about Che Guevara or the movie (really good) that was made about him. This is a narrative about my personal harrowing experience attempting to ride a motorcycle. So if you're a Che-ophile, and are uninterested in anything obtaining to other topics, I'd advise you to stop reading now. However, if you are the sort of person who finds it funny when other people fall down, you should probably continue with this article. Someone definitely falls down in this story.)

Back in April, Nick and I decided it would be fun to take motorcycle lessons, and because the classes were booked so far in advance we had to select a date in mid-July. The lessons were in the form of a three-day crash course (so to speak), with one evening dedicated to classroom instruction and then two full days for practice driving. At the end of the course, we would be given a driving test and a written test. If our scores were high enough to pass, we would take our certificate to the DMV and get a motorcycle license that same day. Doesn't sound so bad, right? I'm a perfectionist, and it never occurred to me that I would do anything other than pass the course with flying colors. I figured I would rock that class like Steve McQueen. Maybe I would even get a medal for being the most exemplary student ever.

We arrived Friday evening for the classroom session. First thing, we were asked to slap on a Hello-My-Name-Is sticker (I had to talk Nick out of writing something obscene on his) and take a seat around a small table that seated four people. Next, we had to interview another person at our table, and then report to the class about them. (You guys may remember this exercise from corporate teambuilding exercises and/or high school speech class.) We also had to come up with a group name in order to distinguish ourselves from the other groups. After about ten seconds of discussion, we settled on the Knight Riders, for no other reason than that one of the guys at our table had just had a dream about David Hasselhoff and we thought it would be really really funny. At last, we started to talk about motorcycles.

The class was run by a retired sheriff and his wife, both of whom were friendly and nice. We covered a lot of information in a short amount of time, watched some videos about motorcycle safety, and took a short quiz over the location of the controls. Before we went home, we were given some guidelines with which to prepare for our Monday and Tuesday riding sessions. See, it turns out that this was the hottest week of the year in Kansas. Lucky us! The temperature would be about 107 with a heat index of 115, and because of this the classes were to begin at 7 o'clock, rather than 8. This wouldn't have been so bad except that we had to drive an hour to get to the class. But whatever. So in addition to the base requirements for attire (long sleeves, long pants, gloves, over-the-ankle boots, helmets, and sunglasses), we had to bring sunscreen, chapstick, and as much Gatorade as we could pack in the car. It was like preparing for a week-long camping trip. But instead of Lake Tahoe, we would be camping on the surface of the sun.

The heat was a serious concern for me. I tend to get heat exhaustion rather easily, and you all know about my experiences trying to stay hydrated without going overboard and flushing too much salt from my system. (Stupid Lollapalooza.) Then there was the earliness factor. We went to bed at about 10 the night before our first outdoor lesson, but I wasn't able to get to sleep until 2 in the morning, which left a total of three hours of rest before getting up for class. So there were a few strikes against me. But I was determined to do it, and I was looking forward to the story I would tell about how I'd survived the hardships of motorcycle boot camp. It would be like Navy Seal training or something. (Yeah, I've seen G.I. Jane a few too many times). Unfortunately, to carry this analogy a bit further, I ended up having to ring the bell to signal that I was going home. God knows I didn't want to, but given my state of mind at the time I recognized that it was the best choice.

Here's what happened.

We started off doing basic familiarization exercises. Mounting and dismounting, turning the engine on and off, that sort of thing. We were given an acronym (FINE-C) to remember the start-up procedure. Switch on the Fuel knob. Turn the key in the Ignition. Shift into Neutral. Switch on the Engine. Use the Choke if necessary. But most of the people in our class had ridden a motorcycle before, so we moved through these preliminary steps more quickly than I would have liked.

Next, we duck-walked the bike down a lane marked with cones, and at the end of the lane, we had to turn the bike around in a small space and duck-walk back. The first problem occurred on my third attempt, when I turned the wheel too far and the bike started to tip over. I tried to hold it up, but even a tiny little Honda Rebel weighs about a million zillion pounds, so that didn't work out so well. I put the bike down, as they say. The instructor just laughed and set it up for me again, reattaching the tail light, which had snapped off when it hit the ground. Embarrassing, yes. But I was still determined to conquer the course.

After awhile, we started to ride short distances. We had to start, accelerate, and then stop before we reached the end of the lane. Simple, right? Well, mastering the controls turned out to be harder than I expected, and my experience driving my '61 Ford Falcon didn't exactly prepare me for the experience of using a hand clutch. Not to mention the crazy two-part brake thing, where you have to use the hand brake and the foot brake at the same time. I was also hyper-aware of being attached to an extremely heavy and dangerous piece of equipment, and the movie screen in my head kept playing a particular Evel Knievel crash over and over again. Anyway, the upshot of all this is that given the heat (Dante's Inferno was invoked several times), the pressure of performing, and the amount of information I had to process, I found myself in a state of mind where I couldn't quite remember what to do or what order I needed to do it in. I was mid-run, rehearsing the stopping procedure in my head, when the instructor signaled for me to accelerate. So I did it. I accelerated. And in the process, the stopping procedure just sort of drifted away from the accessible part of my brain. As I was approaching the end cone, I did remember to squeeze the hand brake, but I ended up cranking the throttle at the same time. (Easy to do, really, since both are activated with the right hand.) The motor growled as I slowed down, and then I made my fatal error. I released the brake. For some stupid reason, I released the brake, and I went barreling toward the instructor like some kind of kamikaze pilot. Tora! Tora! Tora!

I'm sure by this point you're pretty worried about my intrepid instructor. Fear not . . . he's totally fine. I didn't exactly run into him, you see, because he was agile enough to jump out of the way at the last minute. Then he dived across the bike from the side, flipping the engine cut-off switch, and instructor, woman, and bike went down in a scrambling mass against the curb. It was bad. Worse, even, than that nightmare I sometimes have about being trapped overnight in the evil marionette factory.

Humiliating. Slapstick. Many words could be used to describe the accident, and yet they can in no way convey the pure mortification I felt at almost running over my instructor. All my classmates were looking on, and I swear I heard someone shouting "Oh, the humanity!" I was the Hindenberg. I was the disaster of the century.

But unlike the Hindenberg, the Lusitania, or even that infamous Who concert back in the day, there were no serious injuries associated with my disaster. The only damage was to my pride (bruised) and my legs (also bruised . . . the one on my left thigh was shaped like Antarctica). And when it was all over, I had a reassuring chat with the instructors, who were both wonderfully cool about it all. They suggested that it might be better for me to log some time on the back of a bike . . . just so I could get familiar with the feel of riding . . . before I tried to drive one again. After I was comfortable on the back, they said, Nick could ease me into driving his bike, one-on-one, without the pressure of keeping up with a bunch of more-experienced classmates. I thought this was an excellent plan. And besides, the thought of getting back on the motorcycle that day was about as appealing as the idea of repeatedly slamming my hand in a car door. Which is to say, not at all. (I'm stubborn, but I am not a masochist, thank you very much.)

So I went to see Superman again, and Nick finished the course. Afterward, he got his license, and the very next day he picked up a Honda Shadow, which is shiny and pretty and makes me think of Brando in The Wild One. I've been riding on the back, and I love it. But that's another story for another day.

Next time on Karen's Theatre of the Bizarre: Why Spangles is evidence that an alien invasion is imminent.

Bob Davis Interviews Three Applicants for the Human Resources Job

Bob Davis: Hi, I'm Bob Davis, the vice-president in charge of Human Resources for Polaris Inc. I hope you don't mind the group interview format, but we have a lot of promising applicants and this is the best way for me to get a sense of who you are and whether you'd be suited for the position of Human Resources supervisor. So, I'd like you all to tell me a bit about yourselves and your previous employment experiences. Tell me why you believe you are qualified for this position.

The Grand Inquisitor: Ahem. Well, I spear-headed the Inquisition program for several years, and that taught me a lot about conflict resolution and how to deal constructively with difficult employees. I was also responsible for incorporating some fun, teambuilding exercises into the workplace. An interrogation session can be a great icebreaker for employees who don't know each other very well.

Bob Davis: Wonderful things, those teambuilding exercises. And the gentleman next to you?

Rasputin: I was the personal advisor to the Romanov family until some unfortunate events necessitated my departure. I also have a great deal of experience with molding corporate images.

Bob Davis: Great! Any special skills that you feel would be useful as the HR supervisor?

Rasputin: I cannot be killed.

Bob Davis: (chuckling) Well I don't think you'd have much of a chance to demonstrate that particular skill in this company. We haven't had an assassination of a human resources employee yet. But who knows, the year is still young, right? Hehe. Seriously, though, I think immortality is an enviable skill, and I'm sure we could all learn a thing or two from you. Now let's hear from the gentleman in the black jeans. Mr....Mustaine, is it?

Dave Mustaine: Yeah.

Bob Davis: Your hair is very long. How do you keep it manageable?

Dave Mustaine: Conditioner, and my own mixture of egg whites and motor oil.

Bob Davis: Is that motor with an umlaut? I know you metal types are pretty fond of umlauts. Hehe. Well, to the point. What sort of qualifications do you have for this position? What experience do you have with managing personnel issues?

Dave Mustaine: Well, back in '84 David and Greg were having this argument on the tour bus about how to distribute the groupies fairly cause David like blondes and Greg liked brunettes and they couldn't agree...

Bob Davis: (laughing uncomfortably) Fantastic! Well, that about wraps it up.

Dave Mustaine: (still rambling)... And I said, come one guys, we'll rotate, like clockwise...

Bob Davis: I'll call each of you when I've made a final decision. Thanks for your time.

Dave Mustaine: (grinning widely) ... And then everyone was happy, but they still couldn't agree on the beer situation...

Bob Davis sighs deeply and leaves Dave Mustaine alone in the room, talking to himself.

Mitchum Mayhem

And now, I'd like to have a private word with the Mitchum antiperspirant people. I've seen your Mitchum Man ads, and I'd like to advise you to stop before you embarrass yourselves further. The stuff the men do in these ads--persuading a woman that the intimate photos he's taking are for his personal collection, then sharing them with everyone he knows--that's not edgy and cool, it's just creepy. Men who do stuff like this go to jail. And if creepy is truly what you're going for, why not take it a step further with something like this?:

"If you drilled a hole in her wall so that you could watch her anytime day or night ... you might be a Mitchum Man."

See what I mean?

It's obvious why this campaign was launched. It has everything to do with the success of body sprays like Axe and Tag that are marketed toward younger consumers, most of whom have to get their moms to drive them to the store to buy it. But the Axe and Tag ads succeed where the Mitchum ones fail. Don't get me wrong, there's plenty that's offensive about the Axe/Tag campaigns. (A qualified feminist could easily find at least 30 mistakes of misogyny and gendertyping in each ad. Imagine a grown-up version of the back cover of Highlights Magazine.) But these ads are more palatable because they exude a fun, non-threatening, boys-will-be-boys kinda vibe. They are effective in selling an image to men, and yet the whole business comes off as harmless burlesque to women. It's genius, really. You watch it, you roll your eyes, maybe you laugh that they had the audacity to invent something called the Order of the Serpentine, and then you move on. That's why it works. Because it's ridiculous and over the top. But if I were at a guy's house and I opened the medicine cabinet to see a Mitchum body spray, I'd run for the hills. You see, after watching their ads, I associate Mitchum antiperspirant with greasy guys in trenchcoats who feel women up on the subway. It's a yucky, not-at-all attractive image.

You guys know what I'm saying, right? I'm talking about the difference between charming Eric "Otter" Stratton and Sleazemaster Quagmire. Meeting women through the obituaries is one thing. But when the lights go off, "Giggidy-giggidy" is the last thing any woman wants to hear.

Jai

A guy I know named Jai recently asked me to blog about him and his thrilling life. Here's what I came up with.

One day Jai went to a department store with his robot. The clerk was like, "you can't bring your robot in here." And Jai was like, "the hell I can't." And the clerk was like, "is it a seeing-eye robot? Cause only seeing-eye robots are permitted in this store." And Jai was like "Sure, why not? Yeah, it's a seeing-eye robot. Now will you get off my back?" And the clerk was like, "No way, I think you're lying. I don't think you're really blind." And then Jai was like, "I'm not blind, but this is totally a seeing-eye robot, and that's all that matters according to your own rules." And then the clerk was like, "But you shouldn't have a robot here if you're not blind." And then Jai was like "What, do you have some kind of sick prejudice against people who can see? I'm calling the ACLU right now." And then the clerk was like, "I'd rather you didn't. Let's see if we can handle this more professionally." And then the robot shot lasers out of its eyes and incinerated the clerk.

THE END.

I Would Like:

To host my own surrealist cooking show, which may or may not have anything to do with the preparation of food.

To invent a space-age weapon that could reduce a human being to a pile of cotton candy. It would have a candy corn setting, for safety.

To play old-school Nintendo with Bruce Campbell.

Mayonnaise, if it didn't make that awful sound when stirred.

You to purchase a 50-inch television and leave it outside my door.

Ray Liotta better if he wasn't always beating up someone named Karen in his films.

Some more coffee, please.

To do something about all the crocodiles in the sewers.

To recreate the film American Psycho with finger puppets.

To know why I don't have a planet or astral body named after me yet.

It if fleas could be carpenters, but who would make their teeny tiny hammers?

To buy a haunted house and fill it with balloons.

Jon Stewart to be president.

To be a pirate. A sexy pirate.

To know why some of the animals on my farm have started walking upright.

World of Warcraft to be the national pastime.

Aqua Teen Hunger Force to be the national television show.

To show you my Heisman Trophy. Please step into the den.

To bake you a batch of cookies shaped like famous South American revolutionaries.

To cover my arms with tattoos.

Someone to teach me kung fu.

To tell you that I climbed Mount Everest in only a bikini and snow boots. But I can't, because that would be a lie.

To destroy every existing copy of The Wizard of Oz.

Aquaman better if he had a useful superpower.

To end this list with something monumentally clever. Too bad I forgot to think of something that would qualify.

Dear Friends and Family (or Current Resident),

Well, the holidays are over. It is my sincere hope that all of you got what you wanted, although the gospel of the Rolling Stones tells us it's not always possible to do so. Anyway, here are some general observations about the holiday season that has just concluded.

First, I'd like to discuss the Ghost of Christmas Commercials Past. What is it with that ancient Folgers coffee commercial? It's at least 25 years old, judging by the feathered hair and the fact that I remember seeing it from the womb. You know the one I'm talking about. The strapping young son surprises his family by coming home from college or something. He smells the coffee brewing. His precocious little sister runs to embrace him. Then mom comes down the stairs in her bathrobe and exclaims, "Peter?!" Everyone smiles. Good-old dad, honored member of the bowling club, steps up to greet his son. It's the most tiresome Norman-Rockwell-on-lithium family portrait ever, and yet we are re-introduced to it every year, because—I suppose—if the milk is good enough, it never ever goes bad, right? Is this the advertising world's version of playing Bing Crosby records every Christmas? Is it supposed to be vintage chic? Just because legwarmers have come back doesn't mean that we should revive every other trend from that era. What's next, exhuming Reagan? Don't forget there was some nasty Cold War stuff in the 80s. Not to mention the hair. My God, the hair. Even Linda Kozlowski looked like something the cat expectorated. Let's let this Folgers commercial die a natural death, instead of lengthening its agonizing existence with yearly life support. I mean seriously. Twenty-five years is a long time for your advertising guys to be out of ideas.

I got some great gifts this year. A new MP3 player from Nick, a CD sountrack of Spamalot from my parents, and seasons 2 & 3 of Wonder Woman from Nick's family. From my brother in law, I received a Hello Kitty toaster. If you have the heat high enough, it imprints the face of Hello Kitty on your toast, a decoration that is at once grotesque and delightful. Thanks Ryan.

I learned on New Year's Eve that I am the only person I know who is amused by that hyper, unintelligible squirrel on 12 oz. Mouse. Everybody gets Aqua Teen Hunger Force—the warped beauty of Carl on his South Bronx Parasite Diet is self-apparent—but the jumpy, chattering squirrel who is perfectly rendered in a show where the majority of the images barely register as better than stick figures? Not so much. I'd just like to point out that it must be funny to someone else, too, or it wouldn't be on Adult Swim. So just back off, critics of 12 oz. Mouse. The stoners are with me on this one.

Oh, and despite a massive assault from liberal hippie tree huggers who champion nasty concepts like "inclusiveness," Christmas seems to have survived unscathed for another year. With all of this rhetoric of late, I keep picturing Christmas as a battered prizefighter in shiny patriotic shorts, shouting "Adrian!" and spraying blood all over the ring. But how, you may ask, could our beloved Christmas possibly prevail in a world where a diabolical Target posts "Happy Holidays" banners in all of its stores? Maybe it has something to do with the fact that 80 percent of the population celebrates Christmas, and that it's unlikely that this majority will be in any way marginalized or persecuted by a minority who simply wish to celebrate their own holiday and have their country sort of half-acknowledge their identity in the process. No one's keeping anyone from celebrating Christmas. Besides, the "Happy Holidays" trend was initiated by stores themselves because—check it out—Christians are not the only ones who buy things. That's all. Now I don't want hear another word about this, or I'll turn the car around and you won't get any ice cream.

And speaking of the free market, for the billionth year in a row, consumerism was a must for the holidays. Ad agencies (except for the Folgers people) gave us a new crop of commercials showing us why buying stuff is the best way to tell our loved ones how much we dig them. Sears gave us atomically enhanced televisions and wrenches that were so large they had to be carried by several people down wintry city streets. Their ads never compelled me to buy anything, but I did get the urge to read Gulliver's Travels again. Radio Shack, too, blitzkrieged us with ads this year, this time involving a series of people who sit in a "wishing chair" and tell the camera what sort of electronic device they want for the season. It's like televised visits to Santa, except that the people are extremely obnoxious grown-ups. Hey, remember that one chick who told her mom to buy her a particular phone because, if she didn't, she would just have to get it from her doting dad? If I were that girl's mother, not only would I not give her that camera phone, I'd kill her. Kill her dead. "Oops," I'd say to the police. "God told me to do that. No seriously, he totally did." Add to this the usual pablum of doe-eyed (or should I say "dough-eyed") children baking cookies, and you've got one tedious batch of holiday commercials. You know what I really would like to see from advertising over the holidays? Gnomes. Not creepy elves in felt hats ... actual gnomes. Come on guys, Travelocity hasn't cornered the market on this. Gnomes could effectively advertise everything from microwavable pizzas to personal lubricants. Gnomes don't always have to be cheery and helpful, you know. They can be sinister when necessary. They can exude sensuality. They can even do impressions of Margaret Thatcher if the money is right. So the next time those ad execs are trying to find the perfect spokesperson for their holiday juggernaut, I hope they'll consider a spokesgnome instead. Either that or Bruce Campbell. That guy is my hero.

Love and Kisses,

Karen

Well, The Onion does horoscopes, so I thought I'd give it a go. If you like this new feature, I may do it again. If you hate it, I will probably do it again anyway. You should know that it's not that I don't value your opinion. Of course I do. After all we've been through together, how could I not? I love you like (please choose the appropriate category): a brother/a sister/a grandmother/a best friend/my lesbian lover/Benicio del Toro/suede boots/Moons Over My Hammy. But seriously, if I have fun writing these horoscopes, then I'm likely to do more in the future. There's not much you can do about it.

So here we go.

Aries: Today, you will find yourself in a maze, devouring dots and, occasionally, fruit. Like Ebenezer Scrooge, you will be visited by ghosts (anywhere from one to four at a time). These ghosts are not benevolent spirit entities who have come to show you the true meaning of Christmas, however. They are there to kill you. So run away as fast as that jaundiced, legless body can carry you.

Taurus: Your evil clone will attempt take over your life and family today. I can tell you now that your chances of survival are not good. Not that you couldn't defeat him if you exhibited uncharacteristic resourcefulness and developed some sort of high-tech weapon on the spur of the moment . . . but how likely is that, really? I mean, look how you did on that physics test.

Gemini: Today, Gemini, you will wish you had not sold your soul to the devil. He'll show up at your door demanding a refund, and when you ask him for the receipt, he won't have it on him. In the end, you'll get your soul back and everything, but there will be a few very awkward moments.

Cancer: Today, you will become the first monkey to launch a line of designer apparel. The collection will include bubble-head spacesuits, green rain slickers, and blue and white striped flannel pajamas. Enjoy your success without guilt. One caveat: this is a fickle industry. Opposable thumbs may go out of fashion just as quickly as they came in.

Leo: Greetings, Leo. That waitress is totally stalking you.

Virgo: You will receive an expensive gift from your husband today that will make the other mob wives extremely jealous, even dangerously so. If one of them should happen to give you a dish of baked ziti, for God's sake dump it in the garbage disposal at once. I would also stay away from baptisms for a few weeks.

Libra: Today, Libra, you should avoid making eye contact with anyone wearing mittens. Mutants will be attacking your town in the early afternoon, and they will be trying to camouflage their giant pincers.

Scorpio: Scorpio, why, oh why did you have to steal the death mask of Pretty Boy Floyd? Your frat brothers aren't impressed, and the feds are closer to catching you than ever. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Sagittarius: The natural phosphorescent glow in your head tentacle may desert you at a critical moment today. Have a back-up light source prepared.

Capricorn: Cold, cold—it is so cold on your solitary throne, dear Capricorn. You pore over philosophy texts, but they offer no succor for your soul. Your trusted advisers tell you news of your latest military victory, but even the expansion of your kingdom cannot rattle you out of your despair. "Is it truly better to be feared than loved?" you ask the taxidermied corpse of your brother, whom you had murdered so that you might more quickly assume the throne. There he stands in the corner, brandishing an enormous turkey leg and grinning, just as he was at the moment of his death. But he has no answers.

Aquarius: Today you will begin to doubt the legitimacy of the movie you are filming when seventeen goats are led onto the set.

Pisces: At long last, Pisces, you will reveal your secret love for Antonin Scalia to a cold, uncaring world. The world, as always, will respond by ignoring you. Scalia, however, will call the police. This will occur when you show up at his door, drunk, with an armful of flowers, several containers of crab rangoon, and an entourage of masked revellers.

Well, we've reached that blessed time of year, the time of Mother Nature's annual hazing ritual, in which I have difficulty concentrating on even the most mundane things due to constant sneezing. Yes, I have allergies. Nasty ones. Ever since my freshman year in college, they have acted up from late August through early October, and during that period I am like a little bird feathering its nest with Kleenex. There must be a box in every room, and there is always a trash can nearby that is virtually overflowing with the unsightly origami of used tissues. The same is true of my handbag and the pockets of my jeans. Let me tell you, when allergy season rolls around, I am a pretty, pretty girl. Also, my sneezes are of such a volume and timbre that they sound more like coughs, so it probably seems to everyone around me that I have consumption. At times I worry that my violent sneezes have somehow damaged my organs. They practically register on the Richter scale, after all. Perhaps these olfactory seizures have shaken loose some grey matter, causing my brain tissue to leak out, little by little. Could it be that I have lost some critical brain functions or memories? Maybe I went sky-diving one time, and I just don't remember it. Or maybe I have lost my ability to whistle. Nah, I'm fairly certain I couldn't do that to begin with. All I can say with any certainty is that I don't feel like I have forgotten anything. And did I mention that my eyes are itchy? As I discovered last winter, I'm ridiculously allergic to angora, so now whenever my eyes get senstive and teary, I can't help but picture an invisible man dangling an invisible rabbit in front of my eyes. A rabbit with fangs.

You're laughing at me, I can tell. You're saying, "Take a pill, for God's sake." Well, the thing is, I do. I take 24-hour Claritin every day. I used to take Claritin-D, the one with pseudoephedrine, and although it knocked the crap out of my allergies, it also left me feeling dysphoric in a way I usually associate with 19th-century opium dens. I would go into trances. I would watch episodes of "The Nanny" for hours on end. It was bad, bad mojo. So I dropped the D and kept the Claritin, which takes the edge off my symptoms but still leaves plenty for me to enjoy. The mucus. The madness. Good times.

I find that if I stay inside, the symptoms are relatively minor. But if I go outside? May God have mercy on my soul. The thing about Kansas is that the pollen count is higher than most other places in the country. Lucky me, huh? I'm willing to accept this state of affairs, though, because of the countless other benefits I garner living in this fantastic state. For one, we've got absurd extremes of weather, much of which entails soul-crushing humidity. For scenery, we've got drab plains stretching off in every direction. We've got intellectuals like Fred Phelps and his band of righteous thugs. And we've got a state school board obsessing about that pesky evolution theory, instead of acknowledging the primacy of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I mean, if we didn't have something bad here—namely, a pollen count that often slides right off the scales—it just wouldn't be fair to those poor schmucks in California. Like anyone wants to live near the ocean, anyway.

And speaking of the scales, let me take a moment to educate you about allergies. The four families of allergens are these: pollen inhaled while driving to the grocery store; pollen inhaled while camping; pollen from zombies; and pollen encountered while performing an exorcism. These can all be reduced to a single category: pollen encountered while living. (Pollen encountered while dead isn't really much of a hassle.) Now, you may ask, how is it measured? Well you see, every day, all across the country, scientists are standing on street corners with specialized instruments that measure the pollen count. They will then transmit the results to headquarters through the microphone embedded in one of their dental fillings. It's all very slick and high-tech. Frequently, these experts disguise themselves as prostitutes in order to blend in with their environment. In fact, most of the "prostitutes" you see on street corners in particular areas of the city are probably scientists taking pollen measurements. Ask one sometime. You'll see I'm right.

The bottom line is this: allergies annoy me a lot. I'm sniffling and sneezing as I type this. Oh, and let me mention one more thing that annoys me, since we're on the topic. I hate it when people steal a new corduroy jacket out of your car (this just happened to me yesterday). I mean, what is that? Nothing else, just the jacket. It's not as if it was bitterly cold, either. The temperature yesterday was close to 93 degrees, so I know the person who took it wasn't desperate. What I really want to do is buy another one and coat it with poison, just like in that Euripides play, Medea, and leave it in my unlocked car for my thief to find. When the miscreant puts it on, he'll basically be burned alive by the poison. Does this seem excessively violent to you? Don't worry. It's probably just the Claritin talking.

Here's what's been on my mind lately.

Item 1. The new high-backed chairs in my coffee shop are kind of freaking me out. They are made from a blue velvety material and they have tall, wide backs that face the door. Every time I look up, I expect them to slowly swivel around to reveal a couple of grinning corpses or something. It's spooky. I don't like them.

Item 2. I thought I saw Clint Eastwood on an episode of The Golden Girls, but I can't be sure. I was at the gym, and the television was way over on the other side of the room, near the free weights that I never use. It's hard to imagine how the writers would have worked Clint Eastwood into an episode, clever as they were. He was probably dating Blanche, just like every other guy on the show.

Item 3. Also while at the gym, I caught a local news filler about space technology spinoffs. They flashed a short bulleted list on the screen, highlighting some of the great things our society has been blessed with as a result of space research. These are the benefits they listed:

1. athletic shoes
2. MRI/breast cancer detection
3. aerodynamic golf balls
4. cell phones

Hmmm. Clearly, this in order of importance. Who could argue that athletic shoes are the single greatest gift that space science has brought to us? I mean, only half the world's population need concern themselves with breast cancer detection, right? But everyone wears athletic shoes! And while those cell phones may come in handy when our Ford Pinto has crashed and burned on the side of I-70 for the umpteenth time, are they really as useful to us as, say, aerodynamic golf balls? I remember the days when golf balls used to be cube-shaped and full of lead—not aerodynamic at all. Golf was a pretty tough game back then. (Tiger doesn't know how lucky he has it.) Now if only the smart guys and gals at NASA would bend their massive brain power toward developing one of those machines like in the movie Sleeper (you know which ones I'm talking about). Cause there's only one thing better than athletic shoes.

Item 4. It occurs to me that in terms of show business ancestry, Rodney Dangerfield was probably the comedic lovechild of Milton Berle and Harpo Marx.

I have compiled your itineraries. Your summer activities will likely include:

1. Reading at least 20 super-easy picture books so you can qualify for the Book-It pizza party without much effort
2. Basting yourself in coconut oil and climbing into the kiln
3. Barbecuing ill-tempered penguins
4. Applying temporary skull-and-crossbones tattoos to eyelids
5. Playing kid-friendly, non-grave-robbing version of Ghosts in the Graveyard
6. Purchasing self-adhesive prosthetic six-pack for a day at the near-sighted nudist beach
7. Drinking enough beer to fill that huge can outside the Coors brewery
8. Drunken Red Rover
9. Drunken lawn darts
10. Drunken tug-of-war with Uncle Fred's toupee (hippie braids will also work)
11. Sending blood-inked love letters to Johnny Knoxville
12. Playing Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, which entails throwing youngest brother in pit of lava and fashioning a robotic suit for him to wear
13. Family vacation to see the World's Largest Prairie Dog, followed by Carhenge
14. Scavenger hunt for ticks in Katie's hair
15. CPR lessons, hopefully taught by that hot lifeguard with the lazy eye
16. St. Novak's Summer Camp for Boys Who Want to Adopt Oppressive Patriarchal Ideologies
17. Chicken-bladder kickball
18. Submitting self to a condition of starved delirium until finished with new Harry Potter book and able to step out blinking into the harsh sunlight again

Sweet fancy Moses, the aliens are attacking! There's a spaceship hovering over Lawrence, and I've got a pretty good idea that those are laser beams shooting out of the side of it. Even as I watch the town hall get incinerated, I can't help noticing that the lasers look a little bit like disco lights. How sad, that disco may be the last thing I ever think about. I have to think about something else real fast—something cooler—so that my last thought will be a good one! Let's see...um...Morrissey! I love Morrissey. My last thought will be of Morrissey! Or Miller's Crossing, maybe. That's a great, great movie with Gabriel Byrne and Steve Buscemi who was funny as the serial killer in that one movie, Con-Air, or whatever. No! Con-Air can't be my last thought! Crap, Karen, think of something else! Man, those little Jetsons cars shooting out of the spaceship look cool. I can almost see what the aliens look like through the bubble glass at the top. Let me just climb atop this pile of rubble that used to be my house so I can get a better view. Yeah, that's better. Oh, they look just like the guys in Flash Gordon, with the bald heads, fu manchus, and crazy high collars! Who would have thought, after all the cinematic mutations aliens have gone through since the invention of sci-fi, and they turn out to look just like the guys in Flash Gordon! Maybe if I wave at them, they'll think I'm one of them and come down to rescue me. I'd have to wing it from there, of course, and they probably don't know English, but still, it's a start. Oh wait, though, that'd make me an alien collaborator! I can't do that, I can't betray my whole race for the sake of my personal safety. That's just not cool. But then maybe it's all a mistake in the first place. Maybe they are accidentally attacking the wrong planet, or they just need someone to explain to them that Earthlings aren't so bad once you get to know them. Okay, so I'm waving at them now. Not that panicky, stranded-on-a-desert-island-kind waving, but the kind that looks friendly and casual, like "heya neighbor, mind if I come over and borrow some plutonium?" Looks like one of those little Jetson ships is coming this way. Oh my lord they're firing at me they're firing that narrow gun thing! No wait, that was just the windshield wipers cleaning off some bird scat. Whew, that's a relief. I can't believe I'm still alive. I can't believe the grocery store near my house has just been destroyed. Funny, there's a crate of milk sitting there totally untouched in the middle of the rubble. I think when they pick me up I'll do some recon work under the guise of collaboration. I hope they're at least reasonably pleasant to me and not the sort of aliens that are into the probe thing. Wow, I can't believe it took me this long to think about that, but it's too late to back out because the ship is landing right next to me. Ok, the Flash Gordon guy is getting out and walking stiffly over toward me. I wonder if these guys even have joints. And I bet when they speak they have robotic-sounding voices and don't use contractions. Is he smiling? Maybe where they come from, smiling is like frowning. He greets me by slapping my shoulder hard and then hands me a manual. He then begins pointing at various knobs and deely-bobbers inside the little Jetson ship, looking at me periodically as if assessing my reaction. I'm doing my best to look enthusiastic, but this is really, really weird. Suddenly, it's clear to me. He's a used spaceship salesman. This is sooo cool, but I wonder what they use for currency. I'm holding out some money from my wallet, but the salesman only looks puzzled. He shakes his head and gestures at my watch (a cheap digital with rubber straps). I hand it to him without thinking and he hands me the keys. After a couple of false starts, the ship kicks into gear and lifts into the air. And now I'm reeling around, doing donuts in the air over the ruins of Lawrence. This baby is hella responsive. Talk about a sweet ride!

Last Thursday, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) proposed a change to its existing regulations in order to better enforce a law that bans "obtrusive" advertising in space. Spokespersons for the FAA declared that oversized billboards set in low Earth orbit could keep astronomers from doing their jobs.

Pardon me, FAA, but I beg to differ. Not only should we be putting billboards into space, we should be putting as much other stuff up there as humanly possible. The space around the earth is like our front yard, and everyone knows that front yards look their best when they are filled with statuary and other objects. In fact, I think every person on earth should have the opportunity to send at least one thing into space every year (a project that would require extensive coordination by NASA and its worldwide counterparts). The chosen object would be left up to the individual's discretion. Some might send family heirlooms or a copy of their favorite novel to be preserved in the timeless vault of zero gravity. Some might send their particularly obstreperous children (glad this option wasn't available when I was a child). Some would just send up their yearly accumulation of trash, encapsulated in some sort of impenetrable dirigible-sized Glad bag that hasn't been invented yet. Eventually, the skyscape would come to resemble an ever-changing Jackson Pollock painting. I like that. People could gaze at the sky, like always, but instead of feeling compelled to muse on the nature of the universe...blah blah blah, they would be able to look at what is essentially a snapshot of the human soul. The objects in the sky would be nothing if not a direct representation of what we are and what we value.

As an added bonus, they might help shield us from incoming meteors, forming a protective wall of detritus off of which these flying hunks of stardust would simply ricochet. Sure, we wouldn't be able to see much of the stars anymore, including our old pal Sol. But really, what did Sol ever do for us, anyway, aside from providing gravity, photosynthesis, warmth, light, and aqueducts? (Wait, I think the last one may have been the Romans.)

Think it over, FAA. That's all I'm asking. The sky's the limit.

Now that the discovery of extrasolar planets has been verified (planets outside our solar system), many scientists have shifted their focus to determining whether any of these planets have conditions appropriate for Earth-like life. Already we have MOST (Microvariability and Oscillations in Stars), a Canadian spacecraft that observes and records how much stars dim when their planets pass by them. It's like our own little private investigator, the Magnum P.I. of the skies. Of course, if any of these planets show promise they will undergo even greater scrutiny. I predict that MOST will discover:

Slartibartfast

A greenish, phosphorescent glow emanating from one of the stars when various planets pass by it, indicating profound Venus envy

Those damn, dirty apes

Jane Fonda orbiting nearby in a shag-carpeted spaceship

Moff Tarkin

Ooze, lots of green ooze

A planet wholly encircled by yellow ribbons reading "police line: do not cross" (scientists will then have to deduce the nature of the indigenous life forms based on the chalk outlines)

The birth of a fashion trend centered around radiation suits

Kyle MacLachlan and a fat, red-haired floating man with hideous blemishes

A new market for oxygenated chewing gum

Major Tom

Millions upon millions of sea-dwelling creatures who look exactly like Don Knotts

A brand new color, known only as velvet creamsicle (Crayola will get the patent, I'm sure)

Lord of the planet, kneel before Zod

A new definition of pain and suffering, as the spacecraft is slowly digested over a thousand years

Grass that is, in fact, much greener, although a little on the radioactive side

Um, Plan 9?

This was intended to accompany the Wednesday blog, but I didn't get around to posting it. I love the new food pyramid!

No one knows who built the original food pyramid. The method of its construction is likewise a mystery, one which has occupied historians and conspiracy theorists alike for years. At the time of its appearance, you see, the American civilization simply didn't have the technology to create something so complex. Some see this enigma as evidence that an alien super race inhabited America at the time I was a child and has now moved on to build food pyramids on other inhabited planets. I've never been able to embrace this view. Sure, the pyramid is unbelievably cryptic and unduplicatable, but I'm of the opinion that certain highly advanced individuals on our own planet were responsible for its existence. I prefer to see it as evidence of our own greatness.

Regardless of how it came into being, however, the food pyramid has just been revamped by nutrition experts in order to simplify the guidelines for the masses. This is our Latin Vulgate edition, intended to convey—with minimal obfuscation—the food choices we should be making. Every man, woman, and child in America can now see more clearly what dietary recommendations they are going to continue to ignore.

With the new layout of the pyramid, you'll now see horizontal stripes rather than leveled blocks. These stripes are orange, green, red, blue, purple, and yellow, colors which represent, respectively, grains; vegetables; fruits; milk and dairy products; meat, beans, fish, & nuts; and nasty fatty ugly oils that you are to eat only occasionally and not every day for breakfast like I do. The color bands vary in width according to how much you're supposed to draw from them. So while the orange bar is a blazing swath of fruity goodness, the yellow bar is almost nonexistent. It almost appears accidental, as if someone inadvertently brushed a highlighter down the pyramid poster in a board meeting, and it just wasn't ever removed. My favorite part of the new pyramid, however, is the man playing air guitar on the stairs. I love it that the Food and Drug Administration is trying to encourage us to attend more rock concerts.

We should be lauding this revolutionary new pyramid. It's a triumph for the common man and woman, a fearless manifesto for those of us who, try as we might, simply were unable to grasp the complexities of the original. Thank you, FDA! Thank you for having the insight to realize that the real reason our nation has been spiraling downward into an epidemic of obesity is that we didn't know what we were supposed to be eating in the first place.

Like every baby boomer, George W. Bush is a lover of music. In particular, he listens to Joni Mitchell, the Bee Gees, George Jones, George Clinton, Zamfir (Master of the Pan Flute), and the Knack.

Vincent Van Gogh liked peanut butter sandwiches. It's a fact. This is why he used such thick swaths of paint in his work. It made him feel like he was painting with peanut butter. Sometimes he ingested the paint, and this may have contributed to the schizo behavior reported by his contemporaries. (Especially that business about cutting off his ear to spite his face.)

Sometime soon, the New York City subway system may become automated. Officials have authorized a test program on one of their shorter lines that will render the trains fully automated, without need for drivers or conductors. If successful, the system may be implemented citywide. Critics, however, fear that this will cause more short stories to be written about evil runaway subway trains.

Little robot-like guys made from pipes suffer from urinary incontinence. (Seriously, they do. Watch the commercial.)

You will soon be able to buy your own talking Jesus doll. Other dolls in the series include such biblical headliners as Moses, the Virgin Mary, and King David. Aside from possible conflicts with the second comandment and a probable resurgence of the Cult of Mary, I find it comical that the dolls are so absolutely lily white. There just weren't that many Caucasian-complected folks in the Holy Land 2,000 years ago. Maybe one of the things the Jesus doll says is "Hi kids! I may look as white as your Uncle Cletus right now, but I was actually born with very dark skin." In addition, I see lots of blasphemy in our children's future. Have you ever seen a little kid playing with dolls? The second an adult leaves the room, the dolls start making out. This is bad enough with Barbies, but with biblical figures? That's pretty much a direct line to hell.

In a startling break with tradition, the IRS has announced that for this tax season, April 2005, they will be offering tax payment alternatives. Unlike previous years, in which the only acceptible unit of payment was American currency, you will be able to give the government your mint-condition rookie baseball cards, the Hostess cupcakes from your lunchbox, and your best marble shooter.

On Friday, the remake of The Amityville Horror will open in theaters. The ads still refer to this dubious story as a "true" one, just as the book did when it was published in 1978, even though the family revealed a number of years ago that they made the whole thing up. This time around, the cast will include Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, James Franco, Alfred Molina, and Rosemary Harris. Margot Kidder will reprise her role as the family priest. Tom Arnold will provide the voice of the evil pig apparition.

Before long, a company called LifeGem will be offering an unusual service to funeral home customers across the country. For a small fee (4,000 Washingtons on the cheap end), they will convert your loved one's remains into a quality diamond. That's right, a diamond. What's that? It can't be done? Well, I assure you it can be done, and LifeGem is going to make oversized bucks doing it. Here's a quick science lesson to explain the process. (I know, I know—the original Ms. Liberal Arts Curriculum is going to explain the complicated science stuff to people who probably know way more about it than she does. But it's my blog. My forum. So deal with it.)

About 15 percent of the body is carbon, which is released as carbon dioxide upon cremation. What LifeGem does is use a special technique to keep the carbon in the ashes. They then extract some carbon powder from the mix, heat it to incredibly high temperatures, and turn it into graphite. From graphite, of course, it's an easy step to Diamond Jim Brady. It's all something that a fourth grader could pull off for her science fair project. Can't you see it, right next to the bubbling volcano and the home-made battery? She'd win the blue ribbon in a heartbeat. (She'd also have a lifelong appointment with the school counselor.)

Is this perhaps a little outlandish? Well, that all depends on your cultural perspective. Americans are pretty weird about death. We hide our cemeteries, and we stubbornly refuse to think about icky things like DNRs and organ donation until we're forced to. But we're also a sentimental species. Aren't there people who save locks of hair from their loved ones, maybe tucked away in a locket? Aren't there people who send their loved ones' ashes into space, or who have their deceased pets preserved by taxidermists and used as ornamental end tables in their homes (like on that episode of Family Guy)? It's not much of a stretch to imagine that those same people would embrace the idea of their loved ones being converted into a piece of jewelry that could be with them at all times. It's certainly a dramatic way of coping with loss. Is it unhealthy? Well, I guess that's a matter for your therapist.

The stones are only available in blue right now. But before long, you'll be able to get a dead person's carbon in every color of the rainbow. God Bless America!

Puppy Bowl, on Animal Planet. This was what we watched on Sunday instead of that other game. There was a pen designed to look like a football stadium, containing two goal posts, yard markings, tiny painted people in the crowd (with simulated flash bulbs), and lots of frolicking puppies. There was no format, just a bunch of puppies playing. If one puppy jumped on another one, they'd do an instant replay. Sometimes they'd show the Puppy Cam or Bowl Cam (from inside the water bowl). There was no announcer shouting in the background, only the kind of easy listening you hear on the travel channel when they do a panoramic scenery shot. I cannot tell you how mesmerizing this show was. It was like that Bob Ross "Happy Little Tree" show in days of old. Ten minutes into Puppy Bowl, a thin thread of drool began to slip from the corners of our mouths, and I had the distinct sensation that we resembled those children who stand in front of the television, worshiping the Teletubbies for hours on end. Puppy Bowl rocks!

Commercial. That Strattera commercial is my favorite. The woman is sitting in a presumably important meeting, totally spacing out, and all these images are flashing through her head. Most of them are normal—of her kids and such—but toward the end, if you watch closely, you'll see a man in a creepy bunny suit standing in front of some foliage. I don't know what this is about, but I watch for it every time because it's hilarious. Can this be a sly reference to Donnie Darko, I wonder? Why else would Anne be thinking about a guy in a bunny suit? There are any number of scenarios that could explain this, a few of which are not publishable, but I guess the better question is, what were the advertisers smoking when they came up with this in the first place? Nothing is random in advertising. There must have been a moment where some overpaid executive at a long oval table said, "She should be thinking of a guy in a bunny suit." I only wish I could have been there to hear it, so I could have told them how incredibly weird that was, and how it was sure to give children nightmares.

Paula Zahn is obnoxious. Bristling with righteous indignation, Paula Zahn faces off with Ward Churchill, the dissident professor from Colorado. She asks angry questions without listening to the answers. She demands apologies. She is so effusive in her outrage that she barely gives the man an opportunity to speak. She is the epitome of everything that I hate about journalism today. I don't object to the adversarial quality of her interview—sometimes people need to be asked tough questions—but her approach had nothing to do with finding out answers. She ignored the points he made (part of this had to do with her being seriously outmatched intellectually)—and he did have a cogent argument, whether or not you agree with him. In short, it was a ridiculous and embarrassing display on Paula's part. I'd also like to remind Ms. Zahn that there is something called the First Amendment. There are a bunch of others, but the first one is a doozy.

News item #1: After a night of dreadful insomnia, Nick and I have concluded that our bed is all used up. My theory is that there is a given number of sleeps per bed—about 1,000 probably—and we have exceeded that number. I asked the employees at Bed, Bath & Beyond about purchasing a replacement pack for our bed, but they didn't seem to know what I was talking about. Poseurs.

News item #2: I've had several snow days from work this week, which is totally nifty. I'm lucky to work at a place with a generous inclement weather policy (I've worked plenty of places where the inclement weather policy was "get here now or be fired, ye scabrous dogs"). Too bad it takes three hours to de-ice the car before I can get to the grocery store and buy survival goods. Just picture me sitting in our apartment after the power goes out (as it inevitably will)—I'll be huddled up in a ragged army blanket, trying in vain to open a can of baked beans with benumbed, frostbitten fingers. Can you conjure up this scene of Dickensian misery and pathos? And by the way, my overpriced peacoat (with Thinsulate!) from J.Crew is simply not cutting it in these temperatures. I'll have to strap four or five geese to my upper torso before setting foot outside again. That is, if I can tolerate the squawking.

Favorite literary description of cold:

Neil Gaiman in American Gods. "This was not simply cold: it was science fiction. This was a story set on the dark side of Mercury, back when they thought Mercury had a dark side. This was somewhere out on rocky Pluto, where the sun is just another star, shining only a little more brightly in the darkness. This, thought Shadow, is just a hair away from the places where air comes in buckets and pours just like beer."

News item #3: I just heard A Perfect Circle's version of John Lennon's "Imagine." It's all gloomy and minor-key, with a sound that seems to be expressive of drug-addled pessimism rather than hippie idealism. It's almost as if they are being ironic. In fact, it could only be a bigger travesty if it were sung by Britney, or, in the worst of all possible worlds, Britney and Mark David Chapman. A damnable duet, indeed. Reminds me of the first time I heard Limp Bizkit singing the Who's cowboy classique song, "Behind Blue Eyes." I made it to the speak-n-spell part, then threw a ball-peen hammer at the stereo. "What's wrong with you, Fred?" I shouted at the gaping hole. Don't you have any self-respect? Shouting homophobic epithets at concert-goers is one thing, but please keep your angst off my radio."

News item #4: Did I mention I'm cold? It's frickin' freezing in here, Mr. Bigglesworth.

The latest death toll from the Asian tsunami is around 71,000. Can we even fathom numbers like this when it comes to human loss?

Here are some aid organizations, if you're interested in helping out your neighbors across the globe:

UNICEF (The United Nations Children's Fund) is an extremely reputable aid organziation with a long history of assisting children in need. Plus, nearly all of your donation goes directly to the victims. You can also support them by purchasing greeting cards and gifts.

International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies or the American Red Cross

Doctors Without Borders

Direct Relief International

CARE

The world is getting closer and more interdependent all the time, and it's good to remember that we are citizens in the world community. Whatever befalls a portion of the community affects us all. Please help out if you can.

I don't have the heart to write anything more.

Dear Reader:

Nick and I have been busy this year. We hooked up a new DVD player, and then climbed both slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro (the first task was the more difficult). We also adopted a small goblin who claims to be from Milwaukee. Milwaukee—Algonquin for "the good land." Mostly, he lives under the sink and tampers with the hot water heater.

In January, Nick will be beginning a new career as a secret agent for the CIA. His code name will be T-Rex, and his secret signal will be pulling his hands up to his chest and screeching. He'll be swinging on the Riviera one day, and probably buying bootleg copies of Stargate in a Bombay alley next day.

I've been buying a lot of v-necks lately.

I'm doing research for a book about the mating habits of the ibix. It will include observations gleaned from twenty or so Kenyan safaris. Sure, I've never actually been to Africa, per se. But I am an unlicensed private detective, and I've collected quite a lot of satellite photos that will do nicely.

Nick won the Nobel Prize in Science Stuff for his calculations proving that the answer to the question "What is the meaning of life, the universe, and everything?" is in fact 43, not 42, as previously believed. Turns out the error was the result of a misplaced tuna sandwich.

Lucky us! We have secured one of the first spots available for commercial space travel. Turns out the tricky part wasn't gathering the substantial cash required (we are both heiresses and filthy rich), but convincing the recruiter that we have strong enough stomachs to tolerate high speeds and zero g's. In all likelihood we'll projectile vomit all over the other passengers, but hey, it's outer space, so at least it'll look cool.

Let's see, what else? Nick and I figured out how to turn ourselves invisible. Now if only we could make it work for other people.

Happy holidays and best wishes from the Vaughn and the Studt (Karen & Nick)

Well, it's the holiday season in Lawrence, Kansas, and this means one thing in particular to those of us who are natives—there is a massive influx of traffic from Johnson County. Here we are, a town full of artisans and students, hippies and thinking people, and assorted others who make their living pretending to be all of the above. We are the Berkeley of the Midwest. We are the Village people (heh heh). And we have the kind of cultured ambience that summons affluent characters from the suburbs of Kansas City.

That cloud of dust you see on the horizon is a caravan of Hummers from Johnson County making its way to Lawrence for some Christmas shopping. They are everywhere: the orthodontists in their round spectacles, the wives in their interchangeable black leather coats. They have descended on the town like locusts, devouring every living thing and clogging up the lines in your favorite coffee shop. ("Oooh, look Todd," they are tittering, "they have a drink called the 'Sex Bomb!'") Yes, we tell them. It's named after the Tom Jones song. "My gosh—a drink with sex in the name. How hip! I'll get one." The barista with the punk hair smiles tolerantly and fetches the drink. He knows they are eager to please, and they understand the mechanism of the tip jar.

Thankfully, the less adventurous ones don't bother with your favorite coffee shop at all. Without hesitation, they make their way to the illuminated Starbucks sign, the holy grail of the tragically suburban. The round, recognizable sign is glowing like a beacon, and the Johnson County elite shuffle toward it like cattle, like the poor livestock-ized people in The Time Machine when the air raid siren called them to become Morlock fodder. Would I save them if I knew how? Of course. But they are too deeply entrenched in their American fever-dreams. Poor souls.

They pay our bills, in large part. They visit our galleries and shop at our novelty stores. A trip to the Gap is de riguer, even though they could just as easily visit a Gap store back in Johnson County. They drive the wrong way on one-way streets like Tennessee and Kentucky, and are too busy conversing on their cell phones to notice until they come to a screeching halt in front of a chartreuse VW microbus with peace signs painted all over it. Only then—grill to grill with a native—do they realize their error. At this point they give an embarrassed wave and drive in reverse all the way to the next intersection, where nearly a dozen more accidents are just waiting to happen.

Yet we are patient with them. We give them directions when they ask, and recommend restaurants "with a local flavor." They are our burden to bear, and for the most part, we do so with grace.

But we do bitch about them an awful lot.

Dear Santa,

How are things at the North Pole? How is Mrs. Claus? I have been very good this year. There are a few things I want to ask you for.

Please bring me an airplane, a bowl of chili, a fairy godmother, vintage buttons, Jupiter (or one of the moons), fake vampire teeth, a teapot shaped like Sonic the hedgehog, a shriner hat, a goose-down jacket that can be worn at base camp, goggles, Foucault's pendulum, world peace, a plastic Tommy gun, papyrus, a T-Rex skeleton, the Holy Grail, Augra's constellation device from The Dark Crystal, more Hot Wheels, Optimus Prime, an abacus, another tattoo, Duncan Idaho as my personal bodyguard, a red Swingline stapler, croutons, pink hair dye, puppets, Vick's VapoRub, an invisibility cloak, tickets to the Ed Sullivan Show, a Doric frieze, a Nehru jacket, apple tarts, and a pony (if you have any left).

That's all I want. Thanks in advance.

Also, please do something about Blue Man Group. They are a like bunch of scary, grown-up Smurfs.

Love,

Karen

P.S. People say you are fat. I think you are fine just the way you are. Please don't get that surgery where they staple your stomach.

I just realized that Six Months of Solitude has been online for nearly a year—suckers!—so I thought it'd be fun to look back on all the different ways people have found my site. By and large, the hits are from people who make direct requests or come from links, but each month I get a goodly number of hits from inquisitive folks who are looking for something in a search engine. With this in mind, I reviewed my usage data for the past eleven months and compiled a list of my favorite search strings. Keep in mind that someone typed each and every one of these gems into a search engine, and then—through the sublime magic of the internet—ended up at my very own SMoS. Some of these I can figure out, some are pretty random, and some I'd prefer not to even think about. Enjoy.

Top Search Terms That Led to This Site:

1. schizophrenic art
2. thanksgiving castration
3. angus young halloween costume
4. amityville horror house recent picture
5. caricatures of steven seagal
6. totally farted
7. brother can you spare a dime tab
8. fishhook eyeball
9. caesar liked cheese
10. daily life for homo habilis
11. doc holliday slash fiction
12. broken cute meter chinese gymnasts
13. demon doctors
14. pedro's party from napoleon dynamite
15. randy quaid with beard and glasses
16. harry potter slash fiction the tattoo
17. kosher tic tacs
18. bicep cartoon
19. brynner westworld
20. dung bunny
21. draco china hooker
22. scalp udder cream
23. testicular elephantiasis
24. annette funicello in panties
25. geraldo rivera unearths
26. mechanically separated chicken
27. converts into a hearse
28. karen nudist colony of the dead

When I was in second grade, my parents were counselors for a horse-riding camp. The camp was for area youth groups (grade 9-12) so I was way too young to attend, but they brought me along and let me stay in the lodge with them anyway. I had a great time. I got to ride horses, and the older kids were really nice to me. It was all the fun of camp, without any of the ugly parts, like homesickness or barely cooked biscuits.

One evening, though, things went horribly wrong. I had been out riding horses all day and returned just in time for dinner. My parents were already in the dining room, so I hurried into our room and shed my clothing, preparing to hop in the shower. Just before I got in I happened to glance down, and I saw something that made my heart stop. Something was in my belly button, something that looked like a large piece of dirt. I put my glasses on to see it better, and realized with a shock that it was not dirt at all. It was a tick. In my freakin' belly button. And it was enormous, filling up the entire concave area. By the looks of it, it had been sucking my blood for close to my entire life.

I did not scream, but for awhile I was sure I would faint. What was I supposed to do? I didn't know. So I leaned out of the door, still mostly naked, and whispered down the hall.

"Mommy," I pleaded, trying to avoid looking down at the gargantuan invader that was coexisting with my belly-button lint.

Nothing.

More insistently, then. "MOM-my."

Still nothing. I could hear laughter and the clinking of dishes. Dinner had started, and everyone was chattering pleasantly. Clearly, if I was going to get my parents' attention, I would have to go full out and scream. I was still for a moment, considering whether my situation was worth causing a fuss over. I could wait till they were done with dinner, couldn't I? I could go out and eat in a civil fashion, and then quietly tell my mom what the deal was.

In the end, my overactive imagination decided for me.

I had not read Kafka at that point in my life, but just the same, I had a weird vision of the tick growing to the size of a human and lying in my bunk bed with a book in its lap. Reading glasses were perched atop its shiny black nose. I couldn't take it any more.

"MOOOOOOMMMMMMMYYY!!!" I screamed, finally succumbing to panic.

My mom came running, probably thinking I had sliced my thumbs off trying to whittle a piece of wood or something. (So many things can go wrong at camp.) She just looked at me for a moment, without understanding, and then I simply pointed at my belly button. I remember her uttering a little laugh of surprise. "That's huge!" she said. And it was. I was little, after all, and the tick was practically the size of my head.

Mom soaked a cotton ball in alcohol and dabbed the tick with it until it loosened, at which point she used tweezers to pry it off. I had to stand still, which was the most difficult part. The whole ordeal took probably five minutes, but to me it seemed like a lifetime of agony, and I kept thinking of that awful part in STII: The Wrath of Khan where the little leech thing crawls inside Chekov's ear. What if she can't get it out? I wondered. But she did get it out, and promptly disposed of it in the toilet. At that point, I was so exhausted I went right to bed. I don't think I even had anything to eat.

That night, I dreamed of giant ticks who wore my clothing and insisted on going to school with me. Talk about your existential horror.

The summer after Kivawood, I ended up at Circle-C Ranch. Circle-C was a Bible camp, and the emphasis was on developing "soldiers of the Lord." Partly, this emphasis was evidenced by the military-type room inspections, and the fact that we had to stand in formation by the flagpole at 6 every morning.

There was a contest held every night at the Circle-C, wherein each cabin would relate some wacky "spontaneous" thing their counselors had done within the past 24 hours. Although they didn't say so, our counselors clearly wanted to win.

The first bit of hilarity occurred on Monday afternoon. Our two counselors came outside, began singing "I Could Have Danced All Night," and made a feeble attempt at a waltz. It was not terribly funny—too sad to be funny, really—but their intent was obvious. One of the slower-witted girls said, "hey, we should write something about this for the contest!" Gee, you think, Amy? Cause I thought maybe we could write about how these two humorless ladies slurped their breakfast cereal like horses at a trough (which they did). But I kept my mouth shut about this, as I did about so many things at that age. And anyway, I liked writing, so I volunteered to write up an account of the event.

Like now, I had difficulty with public speaking, so when it came time for our group to describe what our counselors had done, I jammed the paper into another girl's hands and let her read it. What I didn't count on was the fact that this girl was mostly illiterate. She stumbled over every word, and stopped dead in her tracks when she reached a word like "incredulous." I had to whisper the pronunciations to her, and even then she mostly got them wrong. As the prize for unscripted wackiness was awarded to some other cabin, our counselors gave me a look of such fury you would have thought I'd assaulted their grandmothers. This was my first failure as a writer, my first realization that when people asked you to write something about them, they mostly expected you to write puling, sycophantic crap. I also learned to take responsibility for my work; I guarantee that if I had read the piece aloud, the result would have been very different. At the very least, people would have known what I was talking about.

It's important to note that this was an ultraconservative camp. I've been to a lot of Bible camps in my day (my dad's a minister, after all), and many of them were downright hippie-ish. At one in particular, we might have elaborate, nonjudgmental discussions about theology, and love feasts in which we'd feed each other grapes and cheese and crackers. We also did a lot of activities whose purpose was to instill trust. Most of these were harmless, but on one occasion there was a trust walk that went horribly wrong. A trust walk is where one person is blindfolded and his partner has to lead him around by verbal commands. "Turn right, keep walking, keep walking, stop. Duck just a little bit, there's a tree branch..." That kind of thing. At one point during one of these exercises, my partner led me into the street, apparently without looking around. I heard the sound of an approaching car, and all of a sudden the guiding hand on my shoulder disappeared. "Run!" my partner yelled, and I heard her footsteps slapping off across the pavement. I tore my blindfold off and started to do as she instructed, but by that point the car was already screeching to a halt to avoid me.

As you might expect, this was rather more injurious to my trusting nature than helpful.

But I digress.

Circle-C Ranch was by far the most conservative camp I've ever attended. We had to memorize Bible verses and recite them twenty different times each day. We had witness sessions in which people shared their evangelism stats (how many people saved outright, how many assists, etc). And one night we had a speaker who preached about the evils of rock music.

This guy went into great detail about how all the popular bands were instruments of the devil. He then began a laundry list of bands that were not popular at all, and a lot of us simply snickered at this. I remember that one kid got up and asked about Stryper. "Surely Stryper isn't an instrument of the devil," he said.

(For those who have the good fortune not to remember, Stryper was a Christian glam band with huge hair. They looked a lot like Poison in the "Look What the Cat Dragged In" era. More to the point, Stryper was not one of those borderline Christian bands who sang ambiguous lyrics that could either be about one's love for God, or for the biker guy down the street. They referred to themselves as "hardcore Jesus freaks." Bible verses were emblazoned across every album cover, and they even threw Bibles into the crowd during concerts.)

Despite all this, the speaker responded that, yes, unequivocally, any group that sounds like or resembles a Devil Band is working for the devil. Therefore, Stryper was working for the devil. This was the point where many of us stopped listening, and pledged one another that we would buy the new Stryper album as soon as we got back from camp. I did it, too. Just to spite him. Although after listening to it, I realized the joke was most definitely on me.

I'd like to clarify something here: It wasn't that we didn't respect this guy's opinion. It's just that he clearly had no respect for us. The world is not so simple that some thirty-year-old white guy in a good suit can tell you exactly what you should and shouldn't believe. And in my opinion, any person or church that tries to discourage you from thinking is bad, bad news. I can't tell you how many times I've gotten into trouble at various camps and spiritual workshops, all because I asked some question I shouldn't have. Here's an example. At Circle-C, during a discussion on Satanism and Satanic symbols, I pointed out that there was nothing inherently evil about an upside-down cross, given the fact that St. Peter was crucified upside down. It was all in the meaning we assigned to these symbols, wasn't it? This comment was greeted with the most withering looks you can imagine. The leader gkared at me for a few moments, her eyes blazing fire, and then kept going without even addressing my comment. In retrospect, I'm surprised she didn't make me wear a scarlet "H" on my clothing for the rest of the week (H for "heretic"). At the time, I was young enough to have been utterly baffled by this reaction. I hadn't been trying to start trouble, after all—I just thought the emphasis on condemning specific symbols was sort of fruitless. But it quickly became clear to me that in certain circles—Circle-C, for example—thinking just wasn't encouraged. And seriously, what kind of God would want you NOT to think about stuff? It seems to me that if you simply accepted what people told you about a given religion without reflecting on it, then any relationship you might have with God would be meaningless because it would be the result of coercion, rather than choice. I don't think that's an unreasonable standpoint. But the folks at Circle-C beg to differ.

Anyway, it's appropriate that after the lecture on rock music, a girl got sent home for wearing a "Bon Jovi: Slippery When Wet" t-shirt and refusing to change it.

I envied her terribly. And not because of the t-shirt.

Camp is a way to get kids out of the house. They are packed up—their names lovingly Magic Marker-ed onto their clothing tags—and then are shuttled off to some tick-infested wilderness, where a single ill-timed heart attack would leave them entirely to their own Machiavellian devices. At camp, you can learn new skills, like canoeing or making lanyards. You have allies, and you have enemies. You can get lucky and be praised for your successes, or unlucky and be put under house arrest because some other kid TP'd the counselor's cabin and blamed it on you. At camp, you will find nice people and mean people, joy and heartbreak. In other words, camp is life.

Girl Scout Camp

I was probably eleven or twelve when I was exiled...er...sent to Camp Kivawood, a camp for girl scouts. In the scope of all the camps I've been to, this one wasn't all that bad. It was a beautiful wooded setting, we slept in covered chalets rather than tents, and we got to do cool stuff like archery. The only problem that the counselors tended to be a bit draconian about the enforcement of rules.

A few of us were out hiking one late afternoon when the counselor called for everyone to return for dinner. This was the night we were scheduled to cook our own meals out by the campfire—pancakes, bacon, biscuits, etc.—and we had been looking forward to it all week. The other girls and I were out of earshot, though, and by the time we made it back to camp, everyone else had finished their meals.

Our counselor was livid. She thrust semi-sharpened sticks into our hands and proceeded to scoop out a large chunk of dough for each of us. Using only those flimsy sticks, we were given exactly two minutes to cook biscuits for our supper. Most of mine dripped off into the fire, and the one biscuit I managed to salvage only got hard on the exterior. I took one bite of that horrible, doughy center and decided it was a far, far better thing to go to bed hungry. The other girls did the same.

And then there were the group showers. This is one of those things grown-ups would never tolerate, but somehow, social norms dictate that it's perfectly fine for kids. One has to suspect there is at least a little malice at work here. "What can we do to exploit the painful self-consciousness of these adolescent girls?" they must ask themselves. "I know! Let's make them take their clothes off in front of one another!" At least in gym class there were separate stalls, although the lack of doors meant anyone who wanted could look in (think of the movie Carrie if you need a point of reference). But at camp, it was just these tall spigots sticking out from the ground, and we were expected to stand in a circle around it, hosing off only inches away from the other girls. Didn't they worry all this communal bathing would turn us into witches or cultists or something?

One day, I tried to leave my swimsuit on in the shower, but the counselor (who increasingly came to resemble one of the more malevolent characters in a Lemony Snicket book), reprimanded me and instructed me take my clothes off immediately. I was mortified. "If you don't take the suit off," she said sternly, "you won't get clean down there." (Here she gestured toward my swimsuit zone.) Yes, thanks, lady. This kind of hygiene pep talk really makes for a healthy outlook on one's sexuality later on. I guess it could have been worse, though. At least it wasn't like the mother from Sibyl, chanting over and over again, "dirty girl, dirty girl, such a dirty girl."

The thing I did like about girl scout camp was that I got to hear some seriously creepy stories. Late at night, with a single flashlight illuminating our faces, one girl might tell about a beautiful porcelain doll who kept killing people with her long fingers. The flashlight would be passed on to the next girl, who would tell about a sinister blue fog that came up out of a lake and swallowed some campers. And there was always some girl who told stupid, stupid jokes that were only masquerading as ghost stories. Anyone remember "roll the log over, roll the log over"? I won't go into detail about that one. Despite what you've been told, I do have some sense of decorum.

Next time: Bible camp!

Take your Christmas lights down. Sweet crackers, madam! Do you realize it is still a week before Thanksgiving? The holiday season goes on for long enough as it is without the likes of you prolonging it even further. Are you so desperate for the approval of your neighbors that you must engage in this shallow display of merriment before anyone else? Are you worried you won't be the first, because somehow your self-esteem is tied into your placement in the holiday lights one-upsmanship contest?

I can see you now, hunkering in your living room, waiting for the tell-tale multicolored lights to illuminate elsewhere on your block. "Are they lit yet?" you ask, hungrily scanning the darkened street, half-hopeful, half-fearful that you will see lights. At last you can bear it no longer, and so you succumb to your compulsion, your madness. Still wearing your terrycloth nightgown, you haul the ladder outside and begin busily stringing up your lights. "I shall be the first," you mutter to yourself, giggling in a way that reminds one of Renfield in the early Dracula movies. But I must ask you—and I beg you to give it serious consideration—does it really matter who is the first to display his good cheer in the form of tiny lights on a string draped over the house like so much phosphorescent kudzu? I think not.

Perhaps I have neglected to mention that I'm a cop. I'm now ordering you to take them down because you're in violation of several local ordinances, as well as a large portion of the city charter. Pursuant to section 14, paragraph 8, the charter reads, "no citizen shall deck his halls with boughs of holly until such time as the day after Thanksgiving has occurred, upon penalty of castration and/or permanent expulsion from the community."

Okay, you have found me out. I'm not really a cop. But I do speak with authority. For I have seen the heinous nature of holiday celebrations gone awry. I have seen houses festooned with red-bowed garlands as early as July or August, and by the time the actual holiday occurs, the citizens have descended into such depths of moral lassitude and debauchery that the devil himself would look on them with greedy envy. An extended holiday is a dangerous thing indeed. I would save you from such a fate, as I would save my fair city. So please, madam. Take the infernal Christmas lights down before I have to come over there and set your house ablaze. I can do such a thing with impunity. I'm a clever, clever girl, and I know a great deal about the preparation of Molotov cocktails.

October 2004

Dear Mr. Sean O'Keefe, c/o NASA;

Hi. Will you give me a job writing about space stuff? I can write about many space things. Like the Sun. I can write about the Sun till my fingers fall off. Also comets, which are like frozen tennis balls flying in space. They even have tails, like my dog Cheddar. Cheddar is a puppy with brown fur. I told my teacher that instead of inches and feet we should learn how to measure stuff as parts of astronomical units. I bet you did not know I knew that word. Neither did my teacher. She got excited when I said it although I said it sort of wrong. Now I am in a higher math class. I get to eat lunch early and sit with the nerds and talk about what happens if Superman fights Spider-Man, though nobody really knows. I am a nerd too I guess, but I heard you hire more nerds than regular people.

Please give me a job. I will work hard writing space books and those big posters at the space center.

Nebulas are cool.

Sincerely,

Karen Vaughn, Age 8 —Space cadet in-training

I was downtown a few nights ago, just browsing the shops and what-not, when a disheveled young man came up and asked for twelve cents.

"Twelve cents?" I asked, incredulous.

"Yeah, twelve cents would be great."

I just stared at him for a moment, then reached for my wallet.

When I got in my car, I waited a few moments to see what the young man was going to do. What did he need my twelve cents for? I knew it wasn't a parking meter issue, because the parking meters don't take pennies. Maybe he was a few cents short on a purchase, and he would be rushing back into a coffee shop or something to pay the remainder of his tab.

Instead, he just stood there, leaning against a parking meter. And then he approached a college-aged guy on the sidewalk. I couldn't hear what he said, but the college guy immediately reached into his pocket and pulled out some change.

I was impressed. Too impressed to be annoyed even. This may be the most ingenious method for panhandling I've ever seen. I mean, who's going to say no to twelve cents? Most of us who live in cities are inured to the ways of the panhandler. We may give these folks our spare change every once in a while, but—sad as it may be—for the most part we've been trained to ignore them and keep moving. We've taught ourselves to avoid eye contact, to behave as if the panhandler doesn't exist. And yet, this shaggy young entrepreneur has figured out how to penetrate the formidable defenses of the middle class. In circumventing a major social construct, he's figured out how to make us see him.

Just imagine. If he hits up fifty people per hour, for eight hours, he'll collect 48 bucks a day. That's $240 a week—$288 if he works on Saturday. That's a decent enough living. Then again, maybe he's a college kid himself, and is only doing this for beer money, in which case an hour's worth of panhandling could keep him blissfully intoxicated for an entire weekend. And you know what? Even if that were the case, I wouldn't begrudge him a penny of it. Not even two pennies. Because just when you think there's nothing new under the sun, somebody comes along and restores your faith in the resourcefulness of the human brain. This is why our species has survived when the dinosaurs couldn't. It's because we're scrappy.

Twelve cents panhandler guy, I salute you!

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Integer ac lacus nec wisi mollis suscipit. Praesent turpis diam, mattis vitae, suscipit at, ultrices in, nibh. Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae; Vivamus dictum diam. Cras auctor, est vel laoreet fermentum, nisl arcu feugiat leo, ac fermentum risus nibh sit amet enim. In hac habitasse platea dictumst. Aenean tincidunt orci. Donec urna sem, consequat sed, mollis sit amet, porta at, metus. Sed egestas massa at wisi. Fusce ultrices urna eu lacus. Etiam molestie. Proin eleifend, ante et fermentum mattis, erat eros porttitor mauris, quis rhoncus lorem nulla nec libero. Nullam a mauris in lacus commodo consequat. Pellentesque magna. Nullam ante lacus, iaculis non, convallis sed, malesuada eu, leo. Nullam nec augue a lorem vehicula viverra.

In felis tellus, scelerisque vitae, luctus sit amet, convallis non, felis. Sed sit amet lectus. Nulla vehicula augue non tortor. Mauris pretium. Nullam convallis rutrum lacus. Suspendisse nec arcu. Nullam purus. Fusce gravida orci. Ut accumsan, dui ut placerat interdum, leo tortor sollicitudin lacus, vitae congue risus magna sed urna. Integer leo magna, fermentum sit amet, porttitor et, hendrerit quis, est. Nunc a est a elit tincidunt faucibus. Phasellus ut risus.

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Sweet, sweet nectar! Six Months of Solitude now has the potential for interaction and dialogue such as the gods themselves will be envious of! Yes, I'm talking about a comments feature, written up by my very own Dr. Nick, the King of All That is Technical. All who breathe, stand in awe of his creation!

As of right now, if you click on the "Comments" button and fill in the various blanks, little parcels of data will make their way from your keyboard to my retinas, as if carried by a tribe of tiny Tinkerbells in mailman uniforms! Is it not amazing? Are you not entertained?

Therefore, if you have something to say in response to my rantings or ravings, fire off a comment or two. I'll be sitting here by the laptop, waiting! Type loud, though, because I will probably be listening to Neutral Milk Hotel with the amps set to 11.

Last night I dreamed I walked awhile to find
You, of the darkest hair and brooding eyes.
I bought you whiskey, seeing there behind
That side-slung jaw, a lover in disguise.
In Miller's Crossing did I first you dig,
And Barton Fink, which scarce was understood.
You stole The Big Lebowski with your jig;
A pedophile has never looked so good.
You are comedic and dramatic genius!
My friends all think I'm fully off my rocker;
But do not fear, for though you are my Venus,
I do not have the patience of a stalker.
Can you love one who does adore your art?
I pray, my sweet, please "look into your heart."

Act III.

MAL, ADJUS, and TED are still sitting in the yard, but MAL and ADJUS are sitting back to back. TED has not moved from his original spot. The sun is going down, it's fairly dark, and the mood is tense.

MAL: I mean, what if he was wrong? I saw Father Miller at the store the other day and he was counting out his change, and he had to do it three or four times to get it right, and I thought to myself, "this guy doesn't seem to be very good at math. . ."

TED: How dare you!

MAL: No, no, all I'm saying is that this is a pretty tricky proposition here. If he claims to have calculated the precise day of the Second Coming, how do we know he didn't switch the numbers around? How do we know it wasn't the year 3481? That would make us about fifteen hundred years early.

TED: That's preposterous!

ADJUS: (looks doubtful) Why would the Lord have picked someone who couldn't count?

(MAL and TED both turn to look at ADJUS. Neither says anything for a moment. MAL begins to snicker.)

TED: He can count, he's just . . .

(a beat)

Ah! I know. Maybe it was like with Moses. Moses had a speech impediment, you know, and when God told him he would lead the Israelites out of Egypt, he said . . .

MAL: (interrupting) N-n-no . . . w-w-w-way.

(TED gives a tremendous, martyred sigh and turns away from the other two.)

ADJUS: I'm hungry. I haven't eaten anything since last night.

MAL: You didn't have breakfast?

ADJUS: Ted told me you can't get to Heaven on a full stomach, 'cause then your soul is too fixed on the things of this world.

MAL: (snorts) Good tip, Ted.

TED: (speaking aloud to himself) You know what this is? This is the biggest test of all—waiting to see who among us will lose faith. I, for one, am not going to disappoint Him. I am His faithful servant. (more quietly) I've already sold all my possessions.

MAL: You what?!

(TED doesn't answer, just looks around doubtfully. The set gets noticeably darker. ADJUS passes out from hunger.)

MAL: Oh, now you've done it, Ted. Poor boy's gone into a coma.

TED: (suddenly shouting maniacally) Look, we are not leaving this spot! We've gone too far to back out! I've surrendered my earthly possessions—all of them, mind you—and I'm wearing the most uncomfortable article of clothing imaginable so do not tell me this was all in vain!

(a beat)

Adjus will be revived in Heaven, anyway.

(MAL stares at TED for a long moment. Finally, he shrugs and pulls a pocketknife from his robes.)

MAL: Guess we'd better eat him then.

End of Act III.
End of play.

Act II.

MAL, ADJUS, and TED have not moved from their respective spots in the yard. It should be clear from the light that it is no longer morning, but mid-day. A faint rumbling sound can be heard in the distance.

ADJUS: (perking up) Is that the distant thunder? The golden chariots swooping down to earth to whisk us away? A storm cloud lowering from the sky, about to engulf us in the fog of heavenly bliss?

MAL: It's the man with the ice cart.

ADJUS: (pointing off-stage) Oh, you're right. Maybe we should get some ice. It's getting very hot out here.

TED: Look, Adjus. You can go get ice if you want, but don't complain when you get back and we've ascended to heaven without you. You'll just have to explain to Him that you had to make an ice run before the Second Coming. I'm sure He'll understand that you were too uncomfortable sitting out in His Creation . . .

MAL: (interrupting) . . . for the last time, I might add.

TED: Yes, for the last time . . . .

MAL: Don't forget the business with the Antichrist.

TED: Oh yes, Mal's right about that. If you miss the boat this time, Adjus, you'll be stuck here on earth with the non-believers and the Antichrist and all that. Very nasty stuff. If you want to get to heaven then, you'll have to die professing your beliefs.

MAL: Guillotines. The Antichrist will have guillotines.

(Adjus looks increasingly horrified.)

TED: Yes . . . er . . . more than likely. There may be guillotines, and you'll have to be beheaded in order to get into the Kingdom of Heaven.

MAL: Plus once you get there, everyone will look at you kind of crooked for the rest of Eternity. And then the Man himself will give you that disappointed look. "If you're going to show up late," he'll say, "you might as well not show up at all. Now let me lead you to our third-class suites, where we keep the servants. You'll be expected to prepare three meals a day, polish halos, pin up droopy wings . . . oh, and don't speak until you're spoken to. . . ."

TED: (with an uncomfortable laugh) Well, I wouldn't go that far.

MAL: Just think how much easier it will be if you stick around now and get to Heaven the proper way.

ADJUS: (sulkily) Alright, alright! I'll wait.

(a beat)

But it's still hot.

End of Act II.

On June 7, 1843, thousands of disciples of the New York Second Advent Association, led by William Miller, donned white muslin "ascension" robes and prepared to be transported to heaven. "Father" Miller claimed to have calculated the precise date of the second coming, and followers all over the country believed him.

MAL: Man in his 40s. Full, graying beard and a stern expression. Skeptical.
ADJUS: 16-year-old boy. Overzealous.
TED: 20ish, with preternaturally white teeth and superior eyes. Sanctimonious.

Act I

(MAL, ADJUS, and TED, clad in white robes, are sitting in a small yard. Behind them is a row of tightly packed, two-story houses. The occasional bird can be heard chirping in the distance.)

ADJUS: When's it going to happen? Father Miller told us it was today. What if it's not today?

TED: It's today.

ADJUS: But how can you be sure?

TED: Because Father Miller is a prophet, and the Lord gave him the power to calculate the precise time of his coming.

MAL: It's special math, Adjus. Special math from heaven.

(Ted gives Mal a dirty look.)

TED: The Lord has given Father Miller a very rare gift. And Father Miller has shared his vision with us.

ADJUS: I'm going to climb up on the roof so I can be closer.

TED: (exasperated) It doesn't matter how high you are. That doesn't matter to Him.

ADJUS: Well, just in case. I'd better get closer so I can go first.

(Adjus begins scaling the house.)

TED: Make sure your ascension robe doesn't catch on the gu . . .(cringing) . . . too late.

(Adjus falls to the ground and lies still for a few moments. The others don't turn around.)

ADJUS: (straining to hear) Was that the last trumpet?

MAL: That was a cow passing gas.

ADJUS: Oh. Still, it sounded a bit like the last trumpet, didn't you think?

MAL: (irritably) I wouldn't know. None of us has heard it before, Adjus. And if we had heard it before, and we hear it again in a few minutes, then the first one wouldn't exactly have been the last, would it? This new one would become the last one.

(Adjus sits up and scoots toward MAL and TED.)

ADJUS: Oh. I'm confused.

TED: Stop trying to destroy the boy's faith, Mal. I can't think of anything more unworthy at this late hour than trying to destroy someone's faith. I'm sorry to say this, but I may have to mention this to Him when we arrive.

MAL: Oh, you're going to tell, are you? Any Creator I'd believe in wouldn't go for tattling. He'd be more likely to fit you with a pair of brimstone galoshes. (grunts) Happy tattlin', partner.

End of Act I.

As you will recall, faithful reader, I've been lifting weights. The muscles are not huge yet, but they are rock-solid and well on their way to looking like Linda Hamilton's. Since the initiation of this weight regimen, there has been a distinct improvement in my strength. I can now wrestle full-sized alligators to the ground.

The light was green. The petite woman in the Hummer approached the intersection, then stopped without explanation. I was waiting behind her, and I couldn't maneuver around. I lightly tapped my horn. She did not seem to have heard. I honked a bit louder, and still she ignored me. Then I saw that she was warbling away on a cell phone. I waited a bit more, but my impatience got the better of me. I lured her outside by placing several Kate Spade handbags on the sidewalk. She flung open the door at once, and I could see that a thin layer of foam was visible around the edges of her mouth. Just then, I picked up the entire vehicle with my massive arms, and flung it into space. "Looks like you'll have to walk to Nordstrom," I shouted, laughing maniacally. By the time she had fished out her kryptonite mace, I was through the intersection and out of her life forever.

Okay. So maybe I didn't really do this. But I wanted to.

Brian Greene is my favorite living scientist.

My first exposure to him was on a NOVA mini-series that aired not long ago, entitled "The Elegant Universe." He was the host, and at first I figured he was just an actor hired to guide us through the brave new world of string theory. He probably didn't even know what he was saying, I thought. He was just too charming, too well spoken, and too entertaining to be a scientist. Then it listed his creds: he's a professor and researcher at Columbia who specializes in string theory and quantum gravity. "Okay," I thought. "So he's a scientist. It's not like he wrote the thing." Turns out, of course, he did. And not only did he write the program, which was adapted from one of his books (of the same name), he's written a bejillion journal articles with names like "Duality in Calabi-Yau Moduli Space" and "Orbifold Resolution by D-Branes." This guy is seriously smart.

I've been interested in string theory for years, but my comprehension of the topic has always been stymied by my limited knowledge of physics. And then there's the problem of math. When it comes to advanced math, I'm pretty much what the curmudgeons would call an ignoramus. I'm not sure how this happened, either—in middle school I loved math. I used to participate in math relays and what-not. Somewhere along the line, though, math became impossibly abstruse, and when I (barely) tested out of the math requirement in college, I had never breathed a bigger sigh of relief. That was when I resigned myself to being a language person and, in so doing, relinquished the last vestiges of a childhood dream. You see, ever since I saw Halley's comet I wanted to want to be an astronomer. But the field of astronomy turned out to be way more complicated than learning constellations and memorizing the order of the planets (My Very Energetic Mother Just Sent Us Nine Pizzas). The looking-at-the-sky part I could do. The part where you had to calculate zenith and azimuth (which sounds like it should be served with very dry gin)—not so much.

So now I'm a writer who looks at the sky.

It could be worse.

Still, I want to understand what makes the world go. I want to understand the nature of space-time, whether my skin has elements in common with Jupiter, and how the universe behaves on a microcosmic and macrocosmic level. That's where string theory comes in—the idea that the most basic components of the universe are vibrating strings, and that the way these strings vibrate determines the properties of particles and forces. For awhile, we thought quarks were the smallest component of the universe, but strings—if they exist—are way smaller than that.

See? String theory is great stuff. I've tried to read books on the matter, but most of them have been written for other people in the scientific community, which is all the way across town from the language arts community where I spend my days. What I really needed was a gifted teacher to take this difficult material—make that extremely difficult material—and explain it so that even a math ignoramus could understand it.

Enter Brian Greene.

Over the course of that NOVA show, I came to understand more about string theory than I would have imagined possible. I may not have grasped the mammoth equations that drive this theory (and it's becoming apparent that I never will), but I understood the analogies Dr. Greene used to describe theoretical phenomena. For example: String theory relies on the existence of extra dimensions, and it's tough to imagine how this would work. Where do these extra dimensions live? Why can't we see them? Does this explain where my car keys went? This is the kind of stuff that blows my mind more than that crazy Hubble photo showing millions upon millions of galaxies in a tiny sliver of space. (For the record, I'm comfortable with four.) But Brian simply asks us to imagine a flagpole. Seen from afar it looks flat, but as you get closer you see that the surface is curved and there is an ant walking around its perimeter. The other dimension was always there—it was just not perceptible to us. Even more complex stuff like supersymmetry makes sense when Brian is explaining it. Quarks are paired with squarks, electrons with selectrons, and so on. And the best part is the name given to these supersymmetric particles—sparticles. There also was some discussion of supercolliders, and how they're being used to check for energy losses with particle collisions. If such losses are shown to occur, this could be proof that the energy is leaking into the extra dimensions required by string theory. This is all crazy science fiction stuff that is so far beyond my ken it's not even funny. But thanks to Brian Greene, I understand it—at least in a rudimentary way.

All that, and personable, too! Most scientists are on the introverted side, socially awkward even, with the degree of awkwardness increasing in proportion to the magnitude of intellect. They've had the social graces pummeled out of them through years of begging for grant money and working in lonely laboratories over the holidays. But there's some vaudeville in Brian. He's the Groucho Marx of the physics world. And he's so friendly and likable, you'd never guess he was brilliant. I bet he has groupies. I bet there are all sorts of women taking his class and writing "I Love You" on their eyelids, just like in the first Indiana Jones. Check out his picture. Have you ever seen anyone so adorable? What? I sound like I have a crush on him? Just shows what you know.

Really.

I totally don't.

Hooray! Nick and I will be going to New York this Saturday for a week-long, belated honeymoon. I am terribly excited. I just know that from the moment I step off the plane, I'll have to fight to keep from belting out "New York, New York, it's a wonderful town" like some barrel-chested, tap-dancing sailor on shore leave. Indeed, I'll be looking for the ghost of Gene Kelly, and for Lauren Bacall in a fabulous dress. If anything remains of Dylan's New York, or that of Woody Allen and Diane Keaton, I want to find that, too. I wonder how much of my knowledge of New York is fiction and how much is fact? Will we see Snake Plissken or Akim or the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man? Will we see De Niro drive by in a taxi?

We're both toting our laptops, and Nick's already printed out a map of all the places near our Manhattan hotel that have wireless access. From the service range, it appears we could just sit out on the sidewalk practically anywhere and be online. (The promised land!) I'm hoping to keep the blog going, and it will probably take the form of a travel diary/picaresque account of two hapless Midwesterners fumbling about in the big city. Remember on Tom and Jerry, when Jerry's hillbilly cousin came to visit him? That's kind of what I'm envisioning—minus the hobo handkerchief tied to a stick.

Our current destinations include the Museum of Modern Art in Queens, Central Park, the Village, Soho, Chinatown, Footlight Records, and maybe the Empire State Building (if it's nighttime and the lines aren't too long). I plan to drag Nick to the CBGB club, one of the places where punk first broke out in America (the Ramones and other punk icons played there), and Sunday night we'll be attending an improv show at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre. We'll also be doing a sweep of the major capitalist hot spots, including Barneys, Macy's, and Saks Fifth Avenue. If anyone—New York native or tourist alike—has any further suggestions, please drop me a line. We'd be grateful for the benefit of your experience.

What will we find when we get there? Forty years of darkness, earthquakes, and volcanoes? The dead rising from the grave? Cats and dogs living together?

Did you notice that the winner's box was empty? That's because you people are incorrigible slackers. I have monitored my inbox for a week, and slash fiction is nowhere to be found. Nothing, zip, nada, the big goose egg. There is only a vacuum where the entries should be, and boy does it suck. I give and I give, and all I get in return is two viruses and a spam offer for cheap Valium (which I am about to make use of, thank you very much). Where are my faithful readers when I need them? Off getting exotic massages, no doubt, or pasting pornographic links into IRC. At any rate, ignoring the blogger who loves them. I've got to hope there's a parallel universe out there (as permitted by the uncertainty principle), one in which I was inundated with entries for my little contest. And you'd better hope so, too. Otherwise your karma is screwed, my friends. Screwed.

I have not asked for much, have I? I have not asked for your soul. I have not asked you to develop a cure for cancer, or to broker a lasting peace in the Middle East. All I asked for was a little creativity, a little effort, a little something to let me know you're listening. You didn't have to use iambic pentameter or anything—just scribble down some nonsense about He-Man and Skeletor. How hard is it, really? You use the word "sinewy" a lot, you throw in a couple of smoldering glances, and bam. Slash fiction. But no. You couldn't even be bothered to try. You sit there with that smug, impassive look on your face, entirely unconcerned about my feelings. This is not a symbiotic relationship anymore—it's a parasitic one. See how I just used science to defeat you?

Criminey.

I don't even know you anymore.

Mrs. O'Malley

Mrs. O'Malley is giggling with glee;
Her troubles are over, she thinks.
She's butchered the vegetables in the ice tray;
There are gruesome remains in the sink.
Her little boy comes from his newspaper route,
Quite hungry for lettuce and beets,
Then screams at the specter the kitchen displays
And runs crazily into the street.
Mrs. O'Malley is sighing aloud,
For she hates to disturb her poor son.
But she knows that it's also his life that she's saved,
And he'll have her to thank when she's done.
Her husband returns from his Fuller Brush job
And goes into the kitchen to wash;
He angrily yells for his wife to come in,
At the sight of the dismembered squash.
She enters serenly, as heroins should;
She's expecting considerable praise.
Mr. O'Malley just throws up his hands
With a wild look, his eyes in a glaze.
"Turn yourself in, or I'll do it," he says
While wielding the knife from the sink.
Mrs. O'Malley walks calmly away
And goes into the study to think.
Later, she tries to explain to her husband
The vegetables' evil device
To conquer the world and grow gardens of people
As health food for turnips and rice.
The police don't believe her; her husband
destroyed, He sadly goes home and restocks.
So Mrs. O'Malley is carried away
While the peppers plot in the icebox.

The Tattoo

The Man sat morosely behind his desk,
Victim of the seething yellow envelope.
Less threatening blue counterparts hovered nearby.
Feeling suffocated, he suddenly stood,
Discarding the petrified remnants of his egg and toast,
And defiantly strode out.

The man felt plucky walking into the boxy little store,
But was startled to see the shopkeeper
Like an aged Viking, noble and haggard,
His bald head dotted with patches of hair,
Like scattered grasses on a plain,
(His teeth of the same green sanctuary.)
The Man hesitated.
He recalled Geraldo's warning about psycho tattoo artists from hell who actually buy the oh-so-sharp knives advertised on television that no one could ever use but that could cut through a medium-sized building if such a situation arose,
Then resumed his calling.

"How about a tree," the Man asked, and felt the weary look of a man who had encountered too many weirdos to care about the wild whims of the business gentleman.
He shrugged and pulled out the giggling syringe,
Venomous and loathsome in its silver beauty.
The Man felt the tingling first, a numbing,
And then his arm was like permafrost.
The Needle inched its way across his arm
Like a ravenous katydid.
When the Man finally sensed the searing of the tinny instrument,
He felt dizzy, and drunkenly swung his head around
To look at his once naked appendange.
A tree was appearing as if sprung from a seed;
The leaves were like vines on fast-forward,
Drugged with Miracle-Gro,
That twisted and surged across the Man's feeble flesh.
He smiled at its splendor.

When the ordeal was through,
The residual tingling made the Man giddy,
And he rejoiced that his prize was well-concealed
Beneath scads of sensible fitted pinstripes.
Then he returned, grinning and nonchalant,
To his home away from home, the Oval office,
Where secret service men ran at him like rabid dogs
Because he had run away again.

When I go to the gym, all I want is some old-fashioned solitude. This is one of the few times I get to be by myself, and it's every bit as crucial to my well-being as food and oxygen. (I'm an only child, after all.) When I'm working out, I want to be inwardly focused, to concentrate on the kinetics of bones and muscles. I do not wish to be spoken to. This is especially true if I am on the treadmill, where my heart rate is accelerated and I'm already in a heightened state of primitive energy. If you talk to me then, I am liable to become enraged, and then I cannot be held responsible for my actions.

Still, it happens all the time. I get a lot of jokes, especially from guys, about how I "practically live here." So what? There are plenty of men who go to the gym every day of the week, too. Am I such an anomaly? I understand that the gym is its own discrete community, and as such, is often viewed as a place for socializing. But I've never cared about that aspect of it. I go because it's too expensive to buy all that equipment myself, and there's no room in our apartment for twenty tons of Nautilus paraphernalia.

The other day, there was a young man who sat down next to me while I was doing my bicep curls. Without warning, he launched into a full-scale discussion of the Adult Swim cartoons. This was a subject I normally would have been excited about, but I disliked this guy instantly because he started off by dismissing "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" (my favorite) as "that stupid show with the fry box." Once that was out of the way, he began to rattle off observations about "The Family Guy" in such a pretentious tone that he could have been doing a dissertation on the subject. He concluded by saying, "Lois is a nymphomaniac—Meg is a tramp." What? Was this a different "Family Guy" he was talking about? Maybe he meant to say "The Fall Guy" or something. Or maybe he was just one of those charming chaps who could put his own misogynist spin on anything. (It's a gift, like optimism.) At this point, I noticed that although he was sitting at a leg extension machine, his legs were just sort of swinging back and forth—he was only sitting there so he could impress me with his critical analyses.

I was trapped by a cartoon pundit.

I didn't want to be rude, but as soon as I finished up the bicep curls, I politely excused myself and relocated to a totally remote piece of equipment. This was about the time a middle-aged guy came up and claimed to recognize me. ("You look so familiar to me. Where have I seen you before? Hey, what do you think of the game?")

Is it that I look so very friendly? I do my best to cultivate a veneer of unapproachability when lifting weights—I scowl, for starters—but no one seems capable of reading such subtleties. Four million years of evolution and these guys can't tell a "come and talk to me" face from a "leave me alone" one. And is it such a stretch that someone with a Bauhaus logo on her shirt is a bit of a misanthrope?

Here are a few suggestions for those who are bored and are tempted to badger the person next to them with pointless conversation:

1. Bring a book
   
2. Bring a discman, or an mp3 player
   
3. Find something riveting on the telly (I'll grant you, that's a challenge these days)
   
4. Schedule your next set of steroid shots
   
5. Make a mental grocery list
   
6. Try to recite the U.S. presidents in order (I know a song about this, if anyone's interested)
   
7. Think up the perfect pick-up line (but don't use it on me!)
   

And because I sometimes run at a nearby track, here's a tip to all of you who may encounter me there. The inside lane is the running lane. DO NOT WALK in the running lane. And especially, don't walk in the running lane and then get all pissy when I run around you, as I will have to do every eighth of a mile unless you move over. Sometimes, there will be a whole phalanx of walkers (usually with sorority letters stitched onto their shorts) taking up the inside three or four lanes. Please don't do this, ladies. All I'm asking for is a modicum of courtesy here, not only for me, but for the poor track student who's trying to time her mile and can't get an accurate measure because she's having to run around you. Remember, without the basic rules of society, we'd all be characters in some neverending Kevin Costner dystopia.

Trust me, nobody wants that.

Dear Diary,

Don't tell anyone, but I'm in love with Donald Rumsfeld. Donald H. Rumsfeld is the paragon of manhood. He is a warrior for our times, a military strategist with the genius of Napoleon. He is a Machiavellian prince who is both feared and loved. And so good-looking! Oh, how I cherish the sight of that lantern jaw, those adorable specs, and that broad forehead cradling the biggest, most remarkable brain in existence. I wish I could get just a little sample of his brain, so I could fry it up and eat it, like the Celts, and maybe the tiniest bit of his formidable wisdom would be imparted to me. Am I freaking you out?

I know he loves me, too. I saw him give a speech once, and partway through his eyes came to rest directly on me. At that explosive moment, I was aware that he was speaking directly to me, that he was claiming me as his own. While his gifted oration went on, he fixed his glance elsewhere (so as not to make the other women jealous), but I could still hear his voice in my head like Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings, quoting Song of Solomon at me (I am my beloved's and my beloved is mine). My knees got weak, I swooned, and the rest of the waitresses had to carry me back to the caterer's tent. (They held those little sweet-n-sour meatballs under my nose until I revived.)

Not long ago, I discovered his poetry. (Every girl loves a poet, but Rummy is a poet with power.) I have begun an epic poem about him, too, and it begins with "I am stuck in the La Brea tar pits of your smile." What do you think, dear Diary?

Rummy, my love. When will you be riding into town on your white steed to collect your own true love? I long to dwell in the palace of Righteousness.

Love,

Karen

There was a time when I gave blood every few months. I've never really had an aversion to needles, so it was an easy way for me to feel I was helping out the community. In fact, the only problem I ever had giving blood was when a delusional Nurse Ratched-type, convinced I was on heroin, kept checking my arm for needle tracks.

That was until a bright, sun-shiney day last May, when everything changed.

First, I sail through the gauntlet of questions, managing to answer each far-fetched sex query without cracking a smile. So far so good. I relax into the requisite blood donation lawn chair and position the magazine in my lap. The bag is hooked up, the needle inserted, and I prepare for a relatively painless sacrifice to La Magra.

But there's a problem. It turns out I have become a slow bleeder. The young man has to turn the needle several times in my arm, catching a different angle of the vessel in order to release a new flow of blood. This gets to be pretty painful, and although the flow starts up again with each turn, it only trickles for a few moments before stopping. My blood is being rationed. It's as if my body is working a soup kitchen, and it has just caught on to the fact that the same fellow has been getting in line again and again, not even bothering to disguise himself. So my body quickly and primly cuts him off. End of story. No soup for you.

Forty-five minutes into the ordeal, the young male nurse finally shakes his head at the mostly full bag and begins disentangling it from the tubes. "Yeah, we're going to have to throw this one away. But look on the bright side," he says, grinning stupidly. "You'll probably never bleed to death."

I am amazed at this. Forty-five minutes of discomfort, and they're just going to throw it away? Exasperated, I ask the young man if we can't just put the blood in some sort of potpourri container, so that it won't go to waste. Type A is type A, right? And if it passes the test for disease markers, then let's just pour it all into a big vat marked "Grab Bag" and be done with it.

"Uh, no," he says. His bland smile reminds me of a fish, and I suddenly realize that I want to hit him. More than anything I want to hit this man.

"I want it back then," I say between gritted teeth. I am just being difficult now.

"What?"

"It's my blood, and I want it back. Give me the needle and just pump it back in. I won't tell anyone."

He sort of laughs, unsure what to make of this. "We can't do that, you know."

"No, I'm totally serious. Just do it. I'm the customer, sort of, and I'm always right."

He's ignoring me now. I want to go on complaining, maybe deliver a zealous diatribe about the failures of the health care system, but by then I am too exhausted and, frankly, too delirious. I am already seeing those little stylized stars, like in the cartoons when Wile E. Coyote gets hit on the head with an anvil. So I eat my cookie, drink my Sprite from a paper cup, and go on home, feeling defeated and angry. Worse, my arm is sore for the next few days—it sporadically expels tiny beads of blood, like some crazy stigmata of the elbows.

So yes, my donor days are definitely at an end. I feel a bit guilty about it, but there's not much point in re-attempting the bloodletting if it's all going to be tossed into file thirteen, is there? And anyway, Mandrake, I have to protect my precious bodily fluids. Purity of essence, you know.

Thine father, oh he must have been a thief,
He stole the stars and put them in thine eyes.
The time I hath to live, my dear, is brief.
Hast thou not seen my missing Nobel prize?
Thou must be full exhausted, for thou hast
Been running through mine head the live-long night.
If I could change the alphabet at last,
Then "U" and "I" together would I write.
I wonder, lady, didst thou bruise thy crown,
When thou fell from heaven's lofty clime?
Excuse me, might I take thy number down?
Methinks I hath somehow misplacéd mine.
What is thy sign? Believest thou in fate?
Wouldst thou not like some raisins? Or a date?

My arms are skinny, and I want them to be muscular, so I've embarked on a mission to beef them up a bit. I won't be using steroids or anything as gauche as that (after all, W made a pretty persuasive case against steroids in his last SOTU address, didn't he?). My inspiration in this endeavor will be Linda Hamilton, as seen in Terminator 2. She is my muse of all things muscular.

Since mid-February, I've been lifting weights for an hour twice a week, and for about ten minutes a day the other five days. Over the past month, I've learned all about rotary lats, bicep curls, tricep extensions, and how you can't do any arm work at all without your shoulder muscles getting all bulbous and freaky like a couple of jet engines under the skin. I can see the difference already, but I'm not yet at the point where I can confidently hold a grenade launcher and face-off with an evil, morphing robot that camouflages itself as its victims. I'm not comfortable shouting macho catchphrases like "Fire in the hole, John!" and I'm not yet able to hold my own alongside a benevolent Future Governor sent from the future to assist me. I will be able to do these things, mark my words, and then the human race will no longer have to worry its pretty little head over the consequences of its own technological irresponsibility.

Also, it's clear that my personality needs a few tweaks. Although it's possible to be absurdly strong and gentle as a bunny at the same time (float like a butterfly, sting like a bee), it's more fun to have an attitude that matches the muscles. To complement my new physique, I'll need a personality that's intense, angry, even borderline psychotic. I'll be listening to the comedy of Louis Black and putting Cannibal Corpse back in the CD player. Anything that gets me worked up. I've got to be like Sergeant Riggs in the first Lethal Weapon—manic, unstable, and always on the brink of a violent outburst. I've got to be Samuel L. Jackson on a bad day.

This could be fun. :)

So, when the robots finally do send one of their own back to find John Connor, I'll be ready for him. "Have you seen this boy?" he'll demand, at which point I'll pull out the grenade launcher, slide up my shirt sleeves, and say, "No. But have you seen my incredibly muscular arms?"

And then I'll take him down with my swinging fist, like Popeye after throwing back an entire can of spinach, and that'll be the end of all that robot apocalypse nonsense.

I just watched Jeffrey Blitz's documentary, Spellbound, about the 1999 National Spelling Bee, and was completely sucked in by it. I used to be in spelling bees myself, back in the day, so I identified with the kids in the film. The overconfidence, the nerves, the attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, the private tics and mannerisms that suddenly become obvious to the world, the sweet dorkiness of the other contestants (I certainly wasn't dorky), the backstabbing, the stalling for time, the glorious and infernal bell that signals your fall from greatness, and the nauseating re-entry into the dreary world of the proles once the whole thing is over—it's all part of what makes spelling bees so great.

Of course, I only made it as far as the state spelling bee, but that was plenty to clue me in to the backstage-Broadway nature of these things. Everyone's a diva, and everyone really needs this job. Preparation is not a piece of cake, either. You study voluminous word lists. You read the dictionary. You memorize word origins, and you dabble in French, Spanish, and German so you can (theoretically) better deduce the spellings of imported words. And still, you may be given some ancient Sumerian derivative and get knocked out in the second round. Sometimes you've never heard the word in your life, and you have to guess. (My district victory was clinched with "isolette." I still don't know what it means.) During the competition, you're torn between delusions of grandeur and plain old debilitating fear. It's like being severely bipolar for ninety straight minutes. Even those with the most serene expressions are terrified of disgracing their family by misspelling something obvious, like when the boy whose parents were from India had to ask the country of origin for d-a-r-j-e-e-l-i-n-g (he spelled it correctly, but only after a painful, protracted guess).

Another thing you learn as a bee participant is that the press cannot be trusted. The same local newspapers who lionize you on Monday will delight in your losses on Wednesday, lording your failures over you with cruel headlines like "Girl Will Remember Spelling of Allotment." No, really. My home-town paper hit me with that bit of yellow journalism, and boy, did it make me feel good about myself. As if that weren't enough, the same paper included a "quote" from my mom, which was ostensibly the result of an interview, but was merely overheard at choir practice. Ah, the ethical relativism of small-town America.

To be honest, I never had the discipline to be a truly great speller. My parents helped me study for an hour each night, and although this seemed like a lot at the time, it was nowhere near as much as the kids in the documentary. (One of them admitted to spending up to nine hours a day practicing. Holy overachiever, Batman!) So maybe if I'd applied myself more, I'd be wearing the winner's laurel right now.

I coulda been a contender.

I coulda had class.

Or maybe I'd have spelled b-i-c-y-c-l-e wrong and been ostracized forever by my kinfolk. You just never know. I think I can truthfully say, though, that if aliens came to earth right now and brought me a Waybac machine for my personal use, I'd probably have higher priorities than the whole spelling bee thing. (Is that really Vlad the Impaler, Mr. Peabody?)

My wife loves Capone. Thinks he's the sexiest man alive. I see him on Clark Street today when I'm out with my cart selling fresh flowers. Daisies, gardenias, hollyhocks, I've got 'em all. And I'm seeing lots of business, seeing how every poor schmuck wants his girl to think he's a romantic on the Big Day. It's cold like February always is, and I'm shivering in my big overcoat that almost reaches down to my brogans. Then I see Capone, in an even longer overcoat, with the collar turned up and dark glasses on. It's obvious he's incognito, but there's no mistaking his enormous bulk; he looks like a professional boxer, or one of those circus strong men. (My wife likes her men strong. Not the kind who sell flowers and weigh a buck fifty sopping wet.) So Capone just stands there, pretending to look at the roses and such, while a fancy car pulls up outside the mechanic's garage across the street. Couple guys dressed like coppers get out and head into the garage, and after awhile I hear gunfire. A lot of gunfire, like a whole mob of hunters shooting at a single duck. Capone tips his dark glasses up, looks me dead in the eye, and gives me a look like, "Don't you worry about that. The world is just as it should be." Then he smiles, takes a daisy off the cart, and ducks into an alley. He has a piece of toilet paper stuck to his shoe, but I don't point it out. Men like him don't take criticism too well. And they sure as hell don't sell flowers.

I just finished re-reading a children's book called The Girl with the Silver Eyes, by Willo Davis Roberts, and it brought back a deluge of memories. The heroine in this book is a 10-year-old girl with telekinesis, and when I first read it, I thought this ability would be about the coolest thing ever (second only to meeting that dreamy boy from Flight of the Navigator). So I tried to do it. I tried to move stuff with my mind. But the results were disappointing, to say the least. It just wasn't fair, I thought. Why couldn't my mom have taken a dangerous, experimental drug when I was gestating, so that I would end up with bizarre abilities that would make my classmates fear me? (Children have a natural Machiavellian sensibility, which is why they go all "Lord of the Flies" every time a bunch of them get stranded on an island together.)

Another trigger for this obsession with telekinesis was Star Wars. Growing up, my whole family was crazy about the movie. Every time we had an extended family get-together, all of us kids would flee to the basement and play Star Wars. The bed in the corner functioned as the Millennium Falcon, and the timer on the exercise bike told us how long until the Death Star exploded. My older cousin always got to be Darth Vader. Another cousin always got to be Luke or Han Solo. As for the girls, in the spirit of fairness we decided on a rather schizophrenic interpretation of the single female character, calling ourselves Princess Leia, Princess Leah, and Princess Lya. Secretly, of course, I wanted to be Luke, and so I tried to use the Force for real, sitting for hours in front of a motionless object, fingers outstretched, trying to get the thing to leap into my hand. When that failed, I'd recreate the scene from the Wompa's cave in The Empire Strikes Back. I'd hang upside down on the monkey bars, trying to reach a Milky Way in my school bag, or flip open my can of Tab without touching it. To my dismay, it never worked. The other kids just thought I was weird—they gave me the same look as when I tried to describe the interdimensional vortex I had built out of Legos, and how my little animal figurines (named Frodo and Sam) would traverse through it into a universe of water (in real terms: the bathtub).

Besides, the blood rushing to my head made me dizzy.

Somewhere during this period, I also became fascinated with Uri Geller, the Israeli spoon bender. Geller did demonstrations of his telekinesis and telepathy all over the world, and he studied painting with Salvador Dali in the 70s. He had beautiful, girl hair. You may have seen him hawking jewelry on QVC.

A word about my buddy, Uri:

When people hear someone has paranormal abilities, they like to say things like "if you're so psychic, why don't you go to Vegas and make a million bucks?" Well, Uri actually did this. Or so he says in his autobiography. He claims he went to Vegas, made a ton of pesos, and then got such a terrible migraine that he had to throw all his hard-won cash out the window, at which point the pain stopped. (In retrospect, it occurs to me that this may have just been a metaphor for having to spend way too much money on brand-name headache medicine. Pesky pharmaceutical companies.) Anyway, he took this as a sign from Jehovah and never did it again. What do we make of this? I don't know, but it seemed interesting at the time.

In his book, Uri explicitly said that everyone has untapped psychic abilities, so naturally I tried that, too. I was trying to bend spoons way before The Matrix told me they didn't exist, convinced that eventually, the matter would rearrange itself before my eyes (and I suppose I'd be right, if I could wait long enough, but modern medicine hasn't quite extended the human life expectancy to 100,000 years.)

Reading The Girl with the Silver Eyes again has renewed my yearning to be a Master of the Paranormal. True, I'm a little more jaded than I was as a child. But then, some of my convictions are still pretty whimsical (case in point: Howard Dean still has a chance, right?), so it just may work. Either way, if you happen to see me in the park someday, staring at some ducks or an elderly woman's flowered hat, just know that I'm not daydreaming, nor am I having a psychiatric crisis.

I'm just trying to bend the world to my will.

Recently, I have begun to suspect that I have a mild form of hypergraphia, that insidious neurologic disorder that dampens a person's impulse control, causing him or her to write obsessively. It can be rated on a scale of 1 (nagging preoccupation, can't go more than a few days without writing) to 10 (Stephen King). I have to admit, if this is true, it's kind of a cool affliction to have. I always wanted some sort of debilitation or tragic moral failing to give me credibility as a writer—something like gambling or womanizing or the compulsion to collect excess fertilizer on weekends and shape it into tall, grooved mounds like Devil's Tower.

Throughout the ages, alcoholism has been the most popular choice for writers. It was embraced by such giants as James Joyce, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, and Truman Capote. Jack London, always the prodigy, started on the bottle when he was five, stealing sips of beer while he carried a sloshing bucket of it into the fields for his stepfather. Nothing to be ashamed of there. However, it's a little late for me to get started down that road, and I certainly don't want to be one of those Janie-come-latelys who only becomes a drinker because she's heard it's the fashionable thing to do. No, indeed. As for womanizing and gambling, I don't really have the temperament for it. Of course, there is a wide world of pharmaceuticals to be tried. Burroughs was all about the morphine and the heroin. Poe, too, was thought to have a crippling opium addiction, although it's since been revealed that this was pure mythology—he was just really, really morbid. And I suppose I could emulate Percy Bysshe Shelly, but where does one obtain laudanum these days, anyhow?

My vices are not glamorous at all. They consist primarily of somewhat disagreeable habits, such as buying too many shoes, talking to myself incessantly, and making up nasty limericks about people I don't like. None of this screams out "greatest literary voice of her generation." I guess I could adopt a weird belief system, something centered around phrenology or the notion of a Flat Earth. But then I'd likely be dismissed as "arcane" or "fringe" or "stupid like a big box of rocks." This kind of pablum won't get you the Pulitzer, unless they create a special category for writers whose strange, anachronistic theories about the world enable them to soar to great heights of mediocrity.

So hypergraphia it is. Hey, I'll take what I can get. Anyway, I'm grateful for the modicum of eccentricity that this malady affords me, and also grateful that it's not so all-consuming as to render me incapable of performing my daily tasks. (So far, my record for continuous writing is seven hours—that's a whole seventeen hours frittered away on pointless activities like sleeping, eating, and going to work). Never have I sat at the keyboard until I was little more than a slumped, delirious ghost of my former self. And just for the record, I have never honestly considered killing people just so I'd have something interesting to write about (as inevitably happens in those weird horror movies that always seem to star Judd Nelson). There are all sorts of good reasons to kill people, as any Raskolnikov can tell you, but writer's block should never be one of them.