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May 15, 2008

My wife pointed out that I’m losing my hair. I had a feeling this might be happening, mainly because of those mornings in the shower where, after lathering, rinsing, and repeating I find a strand or clump of hair in my hands. I’m not sure how I’m supposed to respond to this. Maybe I should just accept it gracefully. As much as I want my hair long, straight, curly, fuzzy, snaggy, shaggy, ratty, matty, oily, greasy, fleecy, shining, gleaming, streaming, flaxen, waxen, knotted, polka-dotted, twisted, beaded, braided, powdered, flowered, and confettied, nangled, tangled, spangled, and spaghettied I can’t fight the call of the wild–or rather the call of the bald. Yes, I do have options. I could buy a toupee and spend the rest of my life having complete strangers stop me on the street to tell me, "Where I come from we call that roadkill!" Or I could be one of those guys who I swear believes that if he combs those three remaining strands over the top of his head no one will notice the glare from his bright pink scalp. I could get plugs. Now, I’m not really a technophobe, but I don’t ever want to stick something called a "plug" in my head.

Besides, do I really want to spend the rest of my life looking like a wire brush? I can just imagine the doctor explaining the technique. "First we’ll give you a local anesthetic, and then we’ll make a bunch of tiny holes in your scalp, okay?" Not okay. I have enough holes in my head already, thanks. And I could take one of those medications, but do I really want to change my personality, make my face break out, and cause my voice to drop a couple of octaves just so I can hold onto my hair and stand shirtless in my living room pounding my chest and saying, "Me John, big tree!"? I know no one goes to the hair salon and says, "Hey, make me look like Jackie Coogan," but there have been some great historical figures who were follically challenged. Look at Socrates, Winston Churchill, or Dolly Parton. Would William Shakespeare have been a great writer if he’d had an elegant blonde coif that looked like it came out of a soft-serve ice cream machine? Of course not. He’d have changed his name to Dirk Turdwilliger, Channel Nine News Anchor. I’m not saying losing my hair will make me a better writer, but it could have its advantages. For one thing all those people who insist on calling me "ma’am" will think twice. Hey, buddy, there’s a reason they call it "MALE pattern baldness". And there’s nothing more romantic or enjoyable than cruising down the highway in a convertible with the wind blowing through my scalp. Admittedly it’s not that bad for me. I’m actually gradually moving toward a look some call "the Friar Tuck". Still, I like my hair. I like it enough that I might eventually start combing the remaining three strands over the top of my head and hope the glare from my scalp will draw attention away from the acne.

May 1, 2008

So a lot of fast food places are now offering these "berry crème swirls", in flavors like strawberry and blueberry even though they don’t taste like any strawberry of blueberry I’ve ever had. And what’s that crème, anyway? It could be whipped crème or or crème cheese or Devonshire clotted crème or maybe even hair crème for all I know. And then there’s the "triple berry mix", but they won’t say what kind of berries are in them. They could be blackberries or raspberries or huckleberries or gooseberries or wineberries or cranberries or ligonberries or elderberries (I’ve been told my grandfather smelled like those) or hackberries or boysenberries or ashberries or Chuck Berry or dingleberries. I think I’ll just stick with smoothies, which are a mix of pureed fruit and yogurt and garbanzo beans and something else, although I’ve gotta watch out with those too.

Have you ever been to a smoothie bar, just looking for a nice mango, peach and broccoli blend and had the guy behind the counter–you know, the one with the soul patch and the tattoo of a cobra that goes down both arms and around his neck–try to push some Vitamin B supplement to stimulate your brain or some powdered sawgrass root to stimulate your south of the border? I’m the kind of guy who could very easily start out having a smoothie with bee pollen and guarana in the morning, just to get me up and going, and then start having a couple with taurine and gingko in the afternoon, and then three or four at night with willow bark, saffron, and oleander extract just to bring me down. The next thing I know I’ll be standing on streetcorners asking people for spare change so I can buy a smoothie. Let’s face it, the smoothie is just a way to have a milkshake while pretending you’re really having something healthy. The sad thing is milkshakes are becoming an endangered species. Nobody sells milkshakes anymore. Every place I go that used to sell milkshakes now offers "milk quakes", because the milkshake is old, it’s passé, it’s not exciting. People want thrills and excitement from their frozen dairy treats! They want their beverages quaked–or maybe quaken–not stirred! Why settle for the plain old milkshake? Demand something made with milk from cows that live on the San Andreas fault, because, if you eat enough milk quakes, sooner or later your footsteps are going to register on the Richter scale.

April 18, 2008

Why is it when businesses hold breakfast meetings they always start by offering coffee, fruit, and bran muffins? Isn’t it unfair to expect people to sit together in a close room paying attention to someone drone on about quarterly earnings after giving them stuff that guarantees they won’t be able to sit still for more than ten minutes?

Why do some personalized license plates seem purposely obscure? I saw one the other day that said, "MRFL SKRG", and I couldn’t help thinking that the guy in the driver’s seat got that plate just so, on his morning commute, he can have the pleasure of watching people behind him mouth out those letters and try to make sense of them. Either that or he’s from Turkmenistan and that’s really his name.

Why do rich people never win the lottery? Or do they and we just don’t hear about it? That seems a lot more likely. Somehow "Rich guy finds lucky ticket in dry cleaning; invests earnings in Guatemalan strip mine" doesn’t sound nearly as uplifting as "Homeless man wins lottery; buys solid gold recliner."

You know that incredible glue that can glue any object to any other object? Why doesn’t it stick to the inside of the bottle?

Why do airlines wait until the day of your flight to cancel it? I understand that sometimes there are emergencies, but when it comes to something like inspecting the tires it worries me that they waited until the last minute to think of that. Wouldn’t we all be a lot happier if, when we went to buy our tickets six months in advance, they just said, "Sorry, we’re going to be conducting maintenance so there won’t be any flights to Topeka on the 19th"? I think this is a conspiracy to sell eight-dollar slices of pizza.

Why does every other commercial now have the warning "Do not attempt"? I swear I’ve seen one that takes place in outer space with a guy being chased through an asteroid field by aliens, and "Do not attempt" was at the bottom of the screen. It probably also said something about, "Professional spaceship pilot on closed course". They put that in there just in case you’re planning on flying your spaceship, or your solid gold recliner, through an asteroid field.

Why is it we always hear about private investigators in movies and television shows but never actually run into any in real life? I’ve never looked at the directory in a fancy building and seen, "Dirk Sniveller, Private Investigator" listed between the accounting firm and the contractor.

Everyone says, "Don’t judge a book by its cover," but if that’s true, why do publishers spend so much on fancy book covers?

Why do recipes never come out looking the way they do in cookbooks and on cooking shows? And wouldn’t it be nice, after you’ve spent twenty minutes putting together a pan of lasagna, to just say, "Here’s one my assistant made earlier," and pull one already cooked out of the oven?

Why do I get the feeling there are good answers to all these questions but that we’d be better off drinking coffee and eating fruit and bran muffins?

April 4, 2008

For a long time I’ve wanted a place where everybody knows my name. You know, a little neighborhood place where I can go in and everyone will yell, "Chris!" and be happy to see me. Well, actually, I do have a place like that, except I always used to imagine it would be a bar and not a sushi bar. Not that I have anything against sushi, or sushi bars. In fact the reason everybody there knows my name is because I’m such a regular customer. Sometimes I can call up to place a carry-out order and they know what I want as soon as I say, "Hello." Thanks to the magic of caller-ID they probably don’t even have to answer. They always do, mainly because they never know when I’m going to throw a curve ball and ask for the Hedorah Roll instead of the Godzilla Roll, but still if it weren’t rude I could probably call, let it ring once, hang up, and show up fifteen minutes later and have dinner ready and waiting.

But why is it called a "sushi bar"? That’s what I really want to know. Let’s face it, a bar is a dark room separated by a long wooden table that you sit at and someone on the other side pours drinks. I’m not knocking bartenders. I’m just saying that anybody can pour liquid into a glass. Bartenders are incredibly talented because they have to deal with drunks, and that doesn’t just take skill; it takes the patience of a saint, and the courage of a…well, of someone who’s really courageous. Circus clowns, or firefighters, maybe. But mostly a "bar" is where they serve either beer poured from a tap or liquor poured straight from a bottle into a glass. A place where some guy juggles bottles while balancing a glass on his head and slicing pineapples with his feet as he puts together a twenty-dollar drink that tastes like alcoholic bubblegum is a "nightclub". Nightclubs are not bars. Nightclubs are clubs you go to at night and when you’re an adult. I’m not sure if there’s a dayclub, or what it would look like. Maybe dayclubs are what you had when you were a kid, which was basically you and your best friend in a cardboard box in the woods, but we just called those clubs. Maybe a dayclub is what snooty English guys go to so they can sit around in smoking jackets and brag about how one of their servants shot a tiger in the Afrikaaner once, but then they call those clubs too. When I first heard a snooty English guy talk about going to his club my first thought was, Why would someone like that go hang out in a cardboard box in the woods? But it actually made sense. I’m sure being a snooty English guy can be very stressful. They might like to have a cardboard box in the woods to go to so they can get away from the world for a while. It’s possible that the horrible class divisions of Victorian England were a misunderstanding because the upper classes had the notion that squalor and abject poverty were in fact tremendously liberating. But I digress. I think the sushi bar deserves to be called something other than a bar. After all, the guys making the sushi are, like bartenders or bottle jugglers, extremely skilled individuals, but it’s a different set of skills. It takes years to learn to prepare sushi, especially fugu, which can kill you. There’s something that really makes you think: a supremely tasty dish that you can savor until your heart stops beating and you fall face-down in your wasabi. I’ve actually never had fugu, but I could imagine whoever served it to me would say, "Enjoy this meal. It could be your last." Believe me, when the guy preparing your food has that kind of power you never want to hang up on him.

March 28, 2008

It’s not that I hate mowing the yard. It can actually be pretty enjoyable to be out there in the sunshine, spending hours and hours getting plenty of fresh air and exercise and building up a good sweat and then finally getting the motor started. The thing that really bothers me is that, as I’m moving along, getting into a really good rhythm, driving hundreds of small creatures before me like Genghis Khan and his hordes and circling around the yard until I have a large plot of uncut grass in the middle of my yard in the exact shape of Sri Lanka, some small insect almost always has to fly up in my face. Usually it’s something harmless like a butterfly or a grasshopper, and I know they’re just being friendly. They’re just saying, "Hey, hi! How’s it going? What are you doing? Need some help? Hey, check out these wings! Just got ’em this morning when I came out the chrysalis!"

What they don’t realize is that I just want to get the grass cut down to an eighth of an inch above the dirt–unlike my neighbor who goes over his lawn with a pair of scissors and comes running out with a hand held vacuum cleaner as soon as a leaf falls–and go back inside. They’re like those co-workers who mean well but seem to spend most of their time searching for funny videos and filling your e-mail box with them while you’re trying to work on the third quarter layoff projections. And then, because they’re not content with clogging up your e-mail box to the point that you can’t get work related e-mails anymore and you start to worry that you’re going to end up being one of the third quarter layoffs, they have to come to your office and stand over your shoulder and watch at least half an hours’ worth of videos of a cat doing somersaults onto the back of a chicken while a guy in the background puts Mentos in a soft drink can, causing it to explode–all set to the tune of "Money For Nothing" by Dire Straits. And you feel bad saying anything because, really, they mean well. I certainly feel bad when I smack away the insects, unless they’re wasps.

Wasps are completely different. They don’t want to tell me anything. They’re like micro-managing supervisors who, under the pretense of watching everything you’re doing, are actually trying to prevent you from getting anything done. When a wasp flies up in my face I don’t smack it away, I get as far away from it and the lawn mower as I possibly can. I’m terrified of wasps, mainly because they’re evil, monstrous, mean-spirited little beasts who only live to kill spiders and sting innocent people. When wasps come at me I’m liable to do something incredibly stupid, like drive the lawn mower right through my wife’s flower bed. I think the business equivalent would be an accounting error that costs the company six billion dollars, although I know a lot of guys who would rather tell the boss they’ve just lost six billion dollars than tell their wife they just drove the lawn mower through the flower bed. I know Freud says there’s no such thing as an accident, but I also know there aren’t a lot of wasps in downtown Vienna. And there’s just nothing to do when you’ve had that kind of accident but face the music. Fortunately now I’m an adult and have a wife who’s very kind and forgiving and understands that sometimes accidents happen, and who won’t put me in the third quarter layoffs, although she might make me go out and work in the garden with the wasps.

March 21, 2008

This morning I reached for the shampoo and realized that, on the back of the bottle, they had a big question mark and the question, "Can you tell the difference between this brand and a more expensive one?" The first thing I thought was, is this a quiz? It was way too early in the morning to even be asking myself questions, never mind being interrogated by the shampoo bottle. And what if I got the answer wrong? Would they break into my house and replace my shampoo, and maybe take my television set to cover the price difference? And how would they know? I don’t care what time of the morning it is, it’s always too early to think about someone secretly quizzing you in the shower. This is the sort of thing that makes me think I should take a shower at night. And I hate these product comparisons. I remember back when soft drink companies used to spend millions on a card table and a shoebox and someone would offer you two cups of liquid and say, "Which of these tastes more like battery acid?" And if you picked the wrong one they’d make you feel really bad and say, "No, sorry, what you drank really WAS battery acid." And it’s bad enough that just a few days ago my wife mentioned that I was losing my hair. It’s kind of hard for me to see the back my head usually, but I took her word for it.

Actually I’m not losing my hair. When I lose something, like my sunglasses, it’s because I put them down somewhere and forgot where they were. Or maybe someone even took them. That might be happening with my hair–it could be the same people who are quizzing me about the shampoo–but I think what’s really happening is that I know exactly where my hair is going. It’s going down the drain, or sometimes when I comb it big clumps of it come out. I’m trying not to get too depressed about this. If my hair wants to go live with someone else or maybe join the circus, well, I’m not going to stop it. I could try using some of those fancy hair growth drugs, although between the acne and the impotence I think letting my hair go might be the best choice. Heck, I could even try that hair replacement surgery because, honestly, I can’t imagine anything I’d enjoy more than having someone drill holes in my scalp and weave big nylon threads through it so I could go around looking like a porcupine with mange. Why should I work so hard at hanging on to my hair? Bald is beautiful, right? Think of all the positive things associated with being bald: there’s the bald eagle, and…Admittedly not even the bald eagle is really bald. He’s just got white feathers on top of his head. The only birds I know of that are really bald are buzzards and vultures, and I’m pretty sure they’re the same bird. The only difference is, really, a buzzard is bald, while a vulture is just losing his hair.

March 14, 2008

The saying is, March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb. I’m not sure about that, at least not the lion part. I think March comes in like a ferret, and I’m not just saying that because I hate ferrets. Seriously, I love snakes, but there’s something about the idea of taking a snake and giving it little pink feet and fur that just gives me the creeps. I see ferrets in pet stores and I’m scared to death they’re going to escape and come after me and crawl up my pants. I think I developed this phobia after I read about a Scottish comedian whose shtick was putting ferrets down his pants. I guess since he was Scottish it’s wrong to call it his "shtick". They probably call it his "o’shenarlaghie". Admittedly you have to admire a guy who can stand up on stage and say, "Take m’bonny wee lass–please!" while a couple of giant furry worms are rotting around in his sporran.

But I digress. Why does March come in like a ferret? First there’s the time change which means I now have to get up in the dark and ferrets really like dark places, like Scottish comedians’ pants. It’s so nice after the solstice to wake up to the sun rising earlier and earlier each morning and then, suddenly, everything’s cranked back an hour. It would be almost worth it to move to Guam. Then there’s the weather. A week ago there was a foot of snow on the ground, and now it’s starting to feel like summer. The difference between the morning and the afternoon is the worst, though, because the mornings are really cold and I wear my heavy coat in to work. Then in the afternoons it’s bright and sunny and people are out wearing t-shirts and tank tops and tube tops and halter tops and harness tops and spinning tops and Levi Stubbs of The Four Tops and shorts and thongs and they’re throwing frisbees back and forth and I’m walking to the car in my heavy coat looking like your friendly neighborhood serial killer. Yeah, I could take off my coat and carry it, but it’s March and as soon as I do the temperature’s going to drop fifty degrees. Besides it’s not easy to carry a winter coat. They’re not made to be easy to carry. They’re made to be bulky and heavy and make you look like the friendly neighborhood serial killer. I’ve been trying to figure out some alternative, something that would be light and easy to carry and also keep me warm when I need it. So far the best thing I’ve come up with is a portable force field, like the kind they use in science fiction movies. The problem is, for now anyway, force fields are still science fiction, but as soon as they’re real I’ll be the first to get one. And I can imagine all kinds of applications beyond keeping me warm even without a heavy coat. A portable force field would allow me to push those idiots who get in the elevator first and then stand right in front of the door back into the corner where they’re supposed to go. I could push aside people who get in front of me on the sidewalk and walk as slowly as they can while weaving back and forth. And in any crowded situation I could make people stay away from me. Of course I could probably do that already by just wearing a thong.

February 29, 2008

I have small ears. I know that’s a weird thing to say, especially since I had a friend back in grammar school who was very self-conscious about his big ears. At least he thought they were big. I never noticed them until he mentioned them, but I could sympathize because I was self-conscious about my big lips. This was years before Hollywood actresses started spending thousands of dollars to have fat taken out of their thighs and injected into their lips so they could go around looking like the incredible Mr.. Limpet–a trend which, unfortunately, hasn’t helped me any. I’ve got the lips, but if I wanted to be a Hollywood actress that would take much more extensive and even more expensive surgery. But I digress. I know I have small ears because I have a portable music device and the earphones pop out of my ears a lot, especially in cold weather when my ears just seem to tighten up even more. Okay, maybe it’s not, strictly speaking, my ears, but the ear-holes. Is there a special name for those? I know there’s an inner ear with three little bones named Shadrak, Meshak, and Abendigo, and that thing that looks like a snail which is called a "cochlea", from the Latin meaning "thing in your ear that looks like a snail". I know there’s an ear-drum. And the things that I used to listen to my music are called "ear buds", which I think is the worst name anybody ever came up with. We had ear buds when I was a kid, you know, and when we did our mothers would grab us and put our heads in a vise and dig around in our ears with cotton swabs until a lot of brown gunk came out. And if they’re really buds as in buddies they’d stay in my ears instead of popping out all the time. If they’re ear buddies maybe they could call them ear chums, although that’s even worse because chum is what you feed sharks. That’s because if you’re with your chum and you see a shark coming, you want the shark to take him and not you.

But I digress. The worst thing about my earphones is that I was exercising recently and some sweat got in one of them and shorted it out so only one of them works now. I’m sure there are some techno-nerds out there who will tell you that this couldn’t possibly happen, but then they’re the same guys who will tell you that when you get that, "Do you want to send an error report?" prompt on your computer it goes to someone who actually cares. And they’d probably also add a variation of the standard computer programmer’s "why would you want to do that?" when you ask if a computer program could do something different (for instance, if you’d like a word processing program to allow you to write letters). They’d probably say, "Why would you want to exercise and listen to music at the same time?" I might be able to stump them by calling it "multi-tasking", but what I’d really like to know is whether anyone else is having this same problem. I’m pretty sure it must be common because these earphones are "one size fits all", a phrase which most people don’t realize is standardly truncated. The full phrase is "one size fits all people except you." Maybe we’re all suffering with this problem and no one’s really caught on yet. Maybe it will become apparent in a few years when Hollywood fashions change and actresses start having special surgery to have skin taken off the soles of their feet and used to enlarge their ears. If that happens I’ll look up that old friend of mine and ask him how it’s working out for him–and if he’s given any thought to becoming a Hollywood actress.

February 8, 2008

So I heard on the news the other day that Swedish scientists have created a cell phone the size of two business cards. This raises an important question: since when did Swedes become scientists? I’m not saying that people from Sweden aren’t smart, but for a long time they seem to have been happy to give out awards to other smart people. Basically Sweden is famous for three things: Stockholm Syndrome, some kind of meatball, and ABBA. Maybe they’ve started becoming scientists because they were feeling a little insecure. Everybody comes to their country to pick up their Nobel Prizes and then they leave and Sweden gets stuck with the check. Heck, even the Danish have the Vikings, those pastries, and museums where you can smoke a bong, pick up a prostitute, and see some of Van Gogh’s best work.

But I digress. Remember the old days when technology was about making things really, really big instead of really small? I was born in the Cretaceous period so I remember when it was a status symbol to have a stereo system that took up your entire living room wall and several of my friends were crushed to death trying to carry really huge boom boxes. If you were really cool you had speakers the size of small apartment buildings. Now if you’re really cool you have speakers that are the size of a small coffee mug but can produce a shockwave of sound that will knock out all the windows of small apartment buildings. I almost said the speakers were smaller than a breadbox, but then I realized that I have no clue how big a breadbox is. When I was a kid people were always describing things as being either bigger or smaller than a breadbox, but I can’t remember ever actually seeing a breadbox. If they’d said a matchbox I might have gotten it, but then I’d have to wonder if it was one of the small matchboxes or one of the big ones. If they’d said a Matchbox car then I would have understood because I had a ton of those things. I’m not sure they are even still around, but that’s okay because most new hybrid cars are about the size of a Matchbox car.

But I digress. Now there’s even a laptop that’s so thin it will fit into an inter-office envelope, which raises the question, what bonehead would put a computer inside an inter-office envelope? If I spend a couple of thousand dollars on a computer the last thing I want to do is put it in something that will guarantee it will get tossed, dropped, folded, bent, spindled, mutilated, and trampled on by a rhinoceros. Send your new laptop via inter-office envelope to the guy in the cubicle next to you and you’ll discover a whole new meaning to the expression "some assembly required". Besides, why would I want a computer that small when I can already get a cell phone the size of two business cards? And I could probably watch movies on it, because there’s no better way to watch a movie than on a screen smaller than my hand. In a few years phones that can play movies will probably be so small that I could walk around with one hand over my eye. People will ask me, "Is there something wrong with your eye?" And I’ll say, "No, I’m just watching Forbidden Planet." Actually they won’t ask because they’ll be walking around with one hand over their eye too.

It’s amazing how quickly we get used to changes like that. It was only a few years ago that I first saw someone using a hands-free cell phone. She was a few feet away from me in an airport and for several minutes I thought she was crazy. You know the saying: talking to yourself is healthy; answering back is insane. Then she turned her head and I could see a little cord dangling from her ear, so I realized it was some newfangled kind of phone. Of course she was talking so much the person on the other end couldn’t possibly have a chance to answer back; they probably had the phone off the hook and were out mowing their yard while she talked. That’s when I realized that your actual importance and your need for that kind of technology are inversely proportional.

February 1, 2008

It seems like there’s a pill for everything now. If you’re too depressed, too happy, if you’re unsure about life’s purpose, if your plants start talking to you, there’s a pill you can take that will even everything out so you can stop being concerned. There’s a pill to help people overcome shyness. How do the people who really need this pill get it in the first place, since they’re probably to shy to tell their doctor they have a problem? Someone who’s really shy isn’t going to say, in a regular checkup, "By the way, Doc, I’m really shy and it’s affecting my work. The other day my boss asked me to give a presentation and I was so upset I threw up all over him." The worst part is the doctor would see this as an excuse to whip out his prescription pad and say, "I’m going to give you a pill for that, and also you need to lose some weight, so I’ll give you a pill for that too. And just in case you get a toenail fungus, here’s a prescription made by a company that just bought me a new car." How did they find out that the pill that helps you overcome shyness worked, anyway? I know they do experiments on laboratory mice. Did they notice that one of the mice which spent most of its time in the corner had, after being injected with a new chemical, suddenly move up to the position of vice president of water bottle control and get a huge bonus in food pellets?

But I digress. The worst part is the advertising, because commercials make people start thinking that maybe they need medications they really don’t. I haven’t thrown up over anyone lately, but I was a little nervous the other day when I had to get up and speak during a meeting, so maybe I need that pill to overcome shyness. And every night while watching television I see a commercial for eye drops. It’s always the same thing: a soothing voice says, "Are your eyes tired, itchy, or red?" And immediately my eyes start itching and, when I think about it, yeah, they do feel kind of tired. Maybe I shouldn’t be watching so much television. Or maybe I need some of those eye drops even though for all I know they’re made from a leftover liquid that was used to process salmon eyeballs for export to third world countries. And the eyedrops are over-the-counter medications, or "OTC" as they’re cleverly called now because "Doctors weren’t handing out enough prescriptions for this crap so we decided to put it on the shelves" doesn’t fit well on a box, even if you reduce it to an acronym. Some pills even add "OTC" to their names even though eventually every pill will be available over the counter. That’s going to cause some confusion, though, so maybe they’ll start coming up with acronyms to describe the conditions the pills treat. For instance, pills made to treat psychosis could have names like Loonien NAF (Nutty As Fruitcake) or OOYT (Out Of Your Tree). I know none of this is new, but somehow I always manage to be behind the times, under the curve, between a rock and a hard place, neither here nor there, a day late and a dollar short. It’s a serious problem for me. I wonder if there’s a pill for it.