November 2003

"oh my Lord
why's it taking you so long
to give me grace
and the dignity to right these wrongs"

We watch the strangest stuff around here. Possibly the only thing stranger than a couple who intends to remain childless watching a show about human reproduction is hearing said couple's comments during the course of the show.

If someone starts showing me a laparoscopic view of actual human ovary as it's trying to, well, ovulate, of course I'm going to start providing Gary Larson-style commentary:

*hand puppet*

"Hi, I'm an ovary."

(Perhaps it was funnier if you were there.)

A few minutes later, as the nice little camera image shows the unfertilized egg ambling along toward the uterus:

Flip the clock to 'wake' and it says 9:05. My watch currently says 12:59; it'd be in my best interests to make good on my weeks-old threat to get at least some sleep before attempting to roll directly from my bed to the car.

"We've got this black-hole policy. Things that get said at the compound stay there."

"Funny," I said, "because we've got something just like that here."

With that said, Chris visited, but so much of what we talked about falls so squarely into the realm of "no one else's business" that I hardly know what can be said about the time he spent here except to acknowledge that it happened.

I'm reminded of the old jokes about soldiers writing home during World War II; they would write long, loving, detailed letters about their situation, their thoughts, and their location. Once the censors were through marking out the parts of the letters that shouldn't have been read by civilian eyes, those lovingly-detailed letters consisted of "Give my love to the family," followed by lines and lines of censoring black, broken only by the occasional 'the' or 'and.'

Consider this oddity spotted recently on CNN, under the headline Male enlargement ads prompt spam rage:

"He said his firm does not send spam but blamed a rival firm which he said routes much of their unsolicited bulk e-mail through Russia and eastern Europe. Mackay said such firms gave a bad name to the penis enhancement business."

Now let's go back and reread that last sentence again, and see if anyone else in the class has the same reaction I did when I read it:

Three hours and fifteen minutes into Thanksgiving, I'm playing a nearly-inaudible set of songs over Winamp, cursing my nocturnal habits, and wondering just when the heck I'm ever going to grow up enough to have holidays at my own house.

Southern families have rules. Nobody bothers writing them down, because why waste paper writing down the obvious? These things are all on the same level of obviousness:

• Left shoe goes on left foot. Right shoe goes on right foot. There should be no leftovers, either of shoes or of feet.
• When someone dies, don't send flowers. Send casseroles.
• You're coming home for the holidays, and don't give us any lip about it either.

So what's the dividing line, exactly? What causes the change in stature from Scion Of Existing Family to External Independent Familial Unit? When is it not just accepted, but expected, that your holidays will be spent under your own roof?