If you're doing more than 2 or 3 things at once, does that make it poly-tasking? I'm: scanning in slides for work, talking on the phone with a friend to coordinate plans for next week, making a blog entry, and in another window, ordering groceries on-line.... my brain hurts.

OK. This entry was not going to be about hell, really, but then I read Mimi Smartypants and her new vision of existentialist hell. Laughed out loud, right here in the office. Just too damn funny. And that reminded me of the scene on the Sopranos when Christopher was shot and had a near death vision of hell, which he described as : An Irish bar where every day is St. Patrick's day. And that one always struck me as being close to true. But Mimi Smartypants has it all over Christopher.

What's your idea of a personal hell? I think mine would contain elements of a Paul McCartney concert where he and Linda were doing a duet of "Silly Love Songs" while my ex-husband kept kicking me in the ankle telling me to enjoy myself. My ex-assistant, the heinous Chihuahua, would have to be somewhere nearby, too.

I'll write what I meant to write later.

Take everybody in charge to a spa. It's my deep felt belief that if you forced all our world leaders to a really good spa, gave them all manicures, pedicures and facials, that you could end warfare. Who can feel like dropping a bomb when they've had their pores steam cleaned with lavendar and sage? Or had their feet massaged with coco butter and exfolitaing salts, followed by a hot towel wrap... well, I should say.

Give Saddam a facial and a foot massage and he'd be putty in the hands of the next diplomat to come by.

Please note: this is what passes for humor. Do not send me e-mail calling me an idiot and a freak. Do not take this to mean that I really believe this is a viable plan for world peace. If you can't stand the jokes, stay out of the blogosphere.

Thanks.

I do. I miss them terribly. I didn't enjoy the show when it first came out because I was living on the New Mexico/Texas border and too many of my husband's students looked and acted like Beavis and Butthead. But then one night I saw the show where Butthead is sitting in class, bouncing his pencil on his desk by dropping it eraser end first and catching it as it rebounds. Then he missed, and the pencil stuck in his eye and he just laughed and said "Cool. It really does happen."

I can't tell you why that struck me so funny, except that I have probably spent hours bouncing pencils off of desks during meetings and classes and what not.

But of all the pithy and profound things B&B ever said, the one thing that resonates more and more as I get older is this:

"Wow. This sucks in ways that things have never sucked before."

Like when my friend Gary died of colon cancer. Or when my friend's brother died. Or her other brother died. Or the Homeland Security Department was signed into law, with the evil Admiral Pointdexter in charge of legal wiretapping of all citizens. Or even the making of the president in the last "election". Yep, as the 21st century grinds along, things are starting to suck in ways that they have never sucked before.