Why are people so lame about their reproductive organs? And why does my life continue to be embroiled in drama? These questions don't require answers. I know the answers. ("Because people are stupid," and "Because the fates enjoy taunting you, Christa.") Why don't we try something new and meet our collectively pressing questions with solutions? There, that's the issue with the world today: too many answers and no solutions. The poverty level is disgustingly high, corporations are stupid, roommates are impossible, boys are equally if not more so impossible, and whatever ways we might be able to solve those problems, we never seem to actually put any obvious answers into use, because they're just answers, not solutions, and we're just stupid stupid people and the fates point and laugh at us and we're all going below in a handbasket and errgh arrgh grumble mumble grr.

Never try to scribble witticisms after a no-sleep night.

More or less, everything hurts. But that doesn't mean I want to crawl in a hole and hide. I've been underground before, and I refuse to go back there. It's not worth it. Only fools believe they can exist without choices and chances. The underground may have fewer traumas at first glance, but there's nothing more traumatic in the long run than substituting death for life. The underground may feel safe -- that is, if there are any feelings to be had there at all; I certainly never felt anything during my stay -- but it also never has any sun. There aren't any flowers underground, there isn't any music, there isn't anything at all but bugs and silence and stasis and the occasional earthquake. But I'd rather take my earthquakes aboveground.

They let me know I'm still alive.

It's funny. It's strange. One week you're on vacation in Hawaii, feeling porky and blind, and the next week you're home getting laser eye surgery. And the day after that, after eleven years of glasses here and glasses there, you're staring into the mirror and wondering where you went. I say "you," being the ever-so-sovereign female that I am (cough), but today, dear virtual fan, I must and do mean me. I must have grown up behind my glasses, is what. I hardly knew the eyes in the mirror today. No, that's not true. I knew my toes, but I did not know they were so wiggly. I knew my brown eyes, but I did not know they were so large. I knew my senses, but I did not know -- nay, I did not realize -- that they could be so already-rounded. The Thing Upstairs has let me become a woman when I wasn't looking, a woman wrapped in the alternating crysallis of a lady. I have a black pencil skirt and black strappy shoes and too curvy of a stomach and am beset by yet more apartment horrors, whiteness, familial weddings, and college irritations, and I couldn't care less. It's all so much . . . laundry. So many things come out in the wash. Worries, woes. Daily fare. These too shall pass. I am me, and me changes, and maybe -- just maybe -- that's not bad at all. Maybe that's the best thing I've heard all year.

And Peter may have to bargain with some pretty strong pixie dust from this strange, funny, blessedly peculiar point on.

You know you're losing your mind when you look down and see you've put on two different shoes. Granted, they may both be strappy black leather sandals, and might very well look as though they're supposed to be mismated in the first place, but you're still losing your mind. In fact, putting on two different pairs of shoes and not realizing it for several hours more likely means you have officially lost your mind already, and are only recently made aware of the fact.

Here I sit
With my shoes mismated.
Lawdy-mercy!
I's frustrated!
(Langston Hughes, "Bad Morning")

At least I'm in good company. And surely there must be benefits for those without a mind. For one, their heads must not weigh as much. For another, they must be able to see what a lot of the minded people cannot see. Lost-minds are no longer dependent on structure, on the status quo, on the principle that nonsense is bad and normalcy is good. And now if you'll excuse me, me and my mismated shoes are going to toddle off into the library and study for a makeup exam. Woooo-eee. Challenge that status quo.

God is not following up on his smiting duties. How do I know about God and the smiting duties and the not following them? Because while I drove down a two-lane road in a perfectly speedy manner on the way to the grocery store, some random strumpet in her daddy's BMW cut me off at a merging point, which only served to place her behind a slow-moving truck. (I waited for God to smite her. No smiting occurred.) Because when I left the grocery store, one of those gnarly-looking, false-charity-bucket-holding yahoos accosted me with the words, and here I quote, "How's the weather up there?" (I waited for God to smite him. No smiting occurred.)

So after giving each unsmited idiot a very large amount of space, I flipped both strumpet and yahoo a big fat Italian bird. Shocked, you gasp? Eyebrows high, you sniff? How can this be, you cry? Never you mind. It's quite obvious that nobody, including Italian-birders, is getting smote today.

50, 51, and 52 are new.

Summer school is over and freedom is in the air. And I don't trust it. That's because Irony is one slippery little bugger. Irony comes in and hurts good people even when they bask in freedom's glow. The prospect of sailing merrily along only to be slapped upside the head with a pungent dose of Irony -- Irony gets a capital letter because it ought to be personified as a villainously thin and flatly chuckling bastard -- fills me with a deep cynicism. In all surprising honesty, I don't want to be cynical anymore. I've been cynical all my life, and it's getting old. I need a new state of being, and Irony isn't letting me have one. Irony isn't letting anybody have one. Irony is strangling the business world and tiptoeing around preconceived notions of relationships and even snatching people who are loved right off the earth. And evil or not, necessary or not, Irony is still very much a part of life.

Sometimes I don't know about all this. Life is mad and unpredictable and poetized up the yin-yang, and that's a beautiful thing. It's also a frightening thing, though, and there aren't that many beautiful-frightening things out there. Life is one, and I suppose love is one. Maybe that's why people continue to write love songs. You can't very well write a song about life. After all, life only rhymes with the words wife, knife, and strife. Not exactly Grammy material.

Unless your name is Eminem.