No Soup For You

Tonight my wife came into my office while I was writing and asked me if I wanted to break the wishbone with her. I said, "sure," then we went ahead and did it.

We pulled on it pretty hard, the both of us, and it snapped furiously, pieces flying into the air. When we looked down, each of us was holding a straight stick of bone, and the crotch of the wish bone was underneath a chair.

So we're both wishless tonight.

Alisa wanted a baby boy, and I wanted my Introduction to Creative Writing course to not be cancelled.

I'm in the New Yorker

I finally made it into the New Yorker. Actually, the whole family made it. Check us out!

I can tell you one thing: He did not remember. And now I will hunt him down and kill him, with my lawyers.

Now He's Everywhere

So I come out of my office and see this and sort of freak out.

The students in my upcoming visual literacy composition course will never believe it. They'll think I staged it, but I didn't. As soon as I showed my wife (it's she who is reading on the couch, not Hussein) the photo, she said, "so you're going to put up another blog entry tonight, aren't you?"

I sighed and said, "Yes, sorry."

P.S. If you think about it too long, that Raggedy Ann in the background is also very scary, but in a Poltergeist "don't-look-under-the-bed" kind of way.

Please don't look at that doll. I'm not responsible.

Partially Cloudy Offensive

The other night I was watching the war with my wife and baby daughter -- like we've been doing for the last few weeks -- and I came to the conclusion that the strangest aspect of the whole thing for me was not the CNN animations, nor was it the fact that Al-Jazeera has hot undraped correspondants, nor was it the constant barrage of ex-military commentary.

No, the strangest part of the was coverage for me was the weather.

Both the Weather Channel and CNN in particular have been covering the weather as if there was no war going on at all. Without the least bit of fanfare or transition, some news meteorologist glides in front of a chroma-keyed map of Iraq with her thumb button where she begins gesturing to a high pressure ridge descending from Turkey.

These reports go something like this: "In Karbala, today there will be a slight change of precipitation, and in the capitol of Baghdad we'll see overcast skies until just after noon, when the low lying clouds will burn off. Highs in Baghdad will be in the mid-to upper 90s."

All this complete with icons of the sun partially hidden by fluffy cartoon clouds and a computer generated map that whooses past like the map of the Colorado ski areas.

It's almost too much.

Slaughterhouse

Last night I dreamt a French word over and over. There was no narrative to the dream, just the word: abbatoir.

Though I am reasonably competant in French (I could vacation without too much discomfort) my vocabulary is quite small. And I've never heard of this word -- abbatoir -- before.

I awoke from the dream and stumbled down the hallway, took a piss, and then went into my study and looked up the word in a French/English dictionary. Even though I had not seen the word in my dream, only heard it, I went right to it.

The word, I discovered, means: slaughterhouse.

Strangely, enough my best friend Michelle, had only yesterday been reading about slaughterhouses in Fast Food Nation.