I’m not very good at keeping up on current events, unfortunately. It really is something I wish I could change about myself. I keep thinking, maybe I should watch the news sometimes, instead of cartoons. But the few times I’ve turned on the news, I’ve been disappointed with the lack of falling anvils on people’s heads. And believe me, some of those anchor people really need anvils falling on their heads.

From what I’ve been able to pick up from hearsay, our current president is kind of dumb and does bad things. Just from thinking about things in my daily life, I tend to agree. So many things are harder than they need to be and just don’t make sense. Like, if the universe is constantly expanding, why can I still never find a parking space near my apartment building? That might not be the president’s doing, seeing as how he probably doesn’t have anything directly to do with the parking authority in my area, much less the physics of space, time, gravity and matter, but still, it’s annoying.

I don’t know if the president or any of his friends read my blog. Probably not, but you never know. Just in case he does, I’d like to go ahead and just say that I sincerely hope, no matter what other stupid things he might do, that he and all the vice-presidents and stuff don’t repeal the law of gravity. I mean, it’s been around since the days of the Constitution, and I think it’s a very helpful, good thing. I think we can all agree that gravity helps us all to live much better lives. In fact, I can’t think of anyone who might disagree with that, but I guess that’s the magic of democracy: Everyone has their opinion and the ones who believe it the strongest win, or something. I’d like to hear someone give me a good reason to take away gravity, but so far I haven’t talked to anyone that can give me even ONE. Maybe it’s because I don’t live in one of those flyover states with all those yokels.

Without gravity, I would have trouble getting up in the morning, because, well, I’d probably be sleeping on my ceiling and, therefore, already up. So, the real problem would be getting down in the morning, and that would be difficult too. And making eggs for breakfast would be a real bitch, what with keeping the eggs down in the frying pan long enough to make them crispy. I’m not even sure how I’d go about doing that. See how unprepared I am for this? ARE YOU LISTENING MR. PRESIDENT? And the worst part about it is, I don’t even like eggs. I never eat them. If the gravity is repealed and I have to start eating eggs, I might just barf.

I just watched the movie Flight Plan the other night, and I thought, “Gee, if gravity didn’t exist, that movie would never have been made. Because if there were no gravity, there would be no need for air travel because people could just float to freakin’ Seattle, or wherever the hell they’re going, and Jodi Foster would have been more likely to lose her daughter to her getting caught in electrical wires than to evil stewardesses (sorry if you didn’t see it and I just gave away the ending; to be honest I didn’t even watch the end and I just guessed what happened).” So, in one fell swoop, you have the end of the airline industry and the end of movies about planes, which would, I imagine, create some kind of crazy crap to happen with the stock market. Not that I own stock, but still.

Speaking of electrical wires, I’m sure electricity needs gravity to flow. I mean, I’m no doctor, but it just makes sense.

So, in closing, I’d give Flight Plan about three stars. The plot had a lot of holes and not a lot of character development, but you can’t lose with a star like Jodi Foster. It’s great to have her back on the big screen.

I was just sitting here thinking about some boys I knew in school who were able to turn their eyelids inside out. It’s still difficult for me to believe that it can be done, even after witnessing it dozens of times firsthand throughout my middle school career, and I certainly never attempted it myself, but at one time in the mid-eighties in a small corner of some forgotten and overlooked suburban educational environment, the act of turning inside out the thin layer of skin protecting one’s eye was all the rage.

I don’t know what was more amazing: The fact that they could perform such an act, or that they even attempted to find out that they could. And I don’t know who among those brave pioneers in my seventh grade class was the first to even think of trying it, but whomever it was certainly deserved to be more celebrated than they were. True, perhaps an older brother or some other strong male presence tipped off that young man to the possibility of such a potentially girl-impressing/nauseating act, but it’s also possible that it was a completely original routine developed one fateful and inspirational evening alone in front of a mirror. Or maybe it was a result of a dare. Whatever the origin, within days of the introduction of the accomplishment, it was not uncommon to be able to look around at any time of the day, during any part of any class, and see some dude sitting there next to you with his freakin’ eyelids turned inside out.

As I said, I never even came close to attempting the eyelid trick. I wasn’t in the social group of young males that took to it so eagerly, and therefore it never occurred to me to try it, nor was I goaded towards it. I tend to think that even if I had been in their fold, the type that at age 12 liked to draw pictures of trucks with gigantic wheels all over the pages of textbooks and laugh incessantly at the spontaneous uttering of the word “boobies” by someone in the back row of the room, I probably would have drawn the line at voluntarily increasing my risk of eye infection or development of a stye. Besides, I had my own personal ingenious ways of grossing out girls. The fact that most of them were unintentional is beside the point.

I wonder sometimes where all those eyelid twisters are now. I lost track of most of them when we all hit high school where I went on to advanced classes, and they were placed in classes put aside for people who like to turn their eyelids inside out. Every now and then I’d pass them in the halls, or I’d see them on the school bus on one of those days when neither I nor my friend Dan was able to borrow the car from our parents, or I’d walk in on them as they smoked in the restroom during class. As far as I can tell, they’d grown tired of their little trick by 9th grade, so there’s really no reason to think that they perform it now. But it pleases me to imagine that they were able to recapture the passion they had for doing unnatural, irresponsible things to their bodies, and that they’ve been able to find some pleasure in their public-school-dropout lives by flipping those lids yet again, just for old time’s sake.

Tuesday is the most poetic day of the week. It should go without saying that that’s especially true for rainy Tuesdays in March. This is a sunny day in January in a town I often find lacking in poetic splendor all year round, so staying awake at all involves a lot of soul-wide-open searching for anything to get aroused about, or we might as well all just close that magic inner eye and take a nice little nap that lasts another year or so. An office cubicle might as well be an ingeniously created antidote to any line of thinking approaching sublime, and the daily grind is doubtlessly a government plot to dull our sense of senseless beauty, but no one ever said finding magnificence in the mundane was easy.

In a perfect world, Tuesday is the day that people come into school or work late, because the mornings are spent in introspection while digging ravines in your oatmeal with the tip of your spoon or while watching a ladybug crawl across a windowsill. Lovers meet in cafes and not say a word after hello, instead only looking off into the rafters and dream of all they’ve got to live for, until their eyes meet again, finding it. Old men saunter down the street tapping a stick against wooden fences, only pausing for the necessary time it takes to skip around a small boy coming the opposite direction, doing the same. The time for school and work does come of course, but the necessary part of the day goes by in a pastel way, as if the true, sharper colors of Monday and Wednesday don’t apply. Even the coldest mid-winter Tuesdays are wrapped in velvet, the snow crunches under the feet in different notes with each step, and the shape of a ghost that your breath makes in the air celebrates before it disperses. Tuesday evenings in this world aren’t for staying out late, they’re for accidental naps that end in surprise to discover the sun has set, and for the sound the boiling water in the iron makes when it’s brought to the upright position away from the clothes it’s pressing, and for wondering if you’ve really never noticed that crack in the wall above the front door before.

I feel bad for people who only see weekdays as five little necessary evils that must be faced, tackled and gotten through before the almighty weekend. Saturday has its obvious allure, but doesn’t it lack in a kind of subtlety? The thrills of a Tuesday are of a special variety, like finding change in between the couch cushions when the craving for a candy bar hits, or the sun breaking through the clouds just as the girl you have a crush on rounds the corner. Anyone can see the brilliance of a Friday night or a Sunday morning; the best thing about the best things about Tuesday is that they’re so hard to see.

I once told my friend Tania that if I could pick the last song I heard before I die, I'd want it to be Two Step by Throwing Muses.

The problem is, ever since then, every time I hear it I'm terrified I'm going to get in a car crash or have a stroke.

I was going through some old papers yesterday and I found an essay that I wrote for my 11th grade history class. The assignment was to research the year that I was born and write 1,000 words on the biggest events and most memorable legacies of that year. I was given a week to complete it, and naturally I waited until the study hall period before the class in which it was due to even begin it, using absolutely no reference materials whatsoever.

Here is the opening sentence:

It should be said right off the bat that the year 1972 was far more than simply the 160th anniversary of the War of 1812.

As you can see, I was off to a great start. Not only did it include historical information and employ it in a manner that the reader, namely my teacher, had never thought of before, I had also managed to use up 25 words towards my goal. The rest of the opening paragraph is as follows:

No, the second year in the decade of the 70’s (that’s right, the second year, not the third. Many people often forget that there was no year “0”, and therefore 1970 would in fact bet the LAST year of the ‘60’s, not the first year of the ‘ 70’s) was chock full of events that will not soon be forgotten by those that study history, commonly known as “historians.” Come with me now as we investigate this complex, fascinating 12-month epoch known as…1972, AD.

I knew from years of experience with last-minute essay writing that the easy part was over. The opening paragraph was all fluff and buildup; the next paragraph would have to contain actual facts. So:

1972 began at the stroke of midnight on January 1st, 1972, and ended at midnight, December 31st, 1972.

At this point I sort of hit a wall. I remember looking up at the ceiling and chewing on the end of my pen a little bit. Being sixteen at the time, I’m sure sex crossed my mind at least ten times during the five-minute bout with writers block. Then I refocused and pushed on.

365 days passed in that span, encompassed in 52 weeks and spread throughout 12 months.

I must have been really desperate, because at this point I listed the names of the months, then the names of the days of the week, and, for some reason, a detailed explanation of what a leap year is, even though 1972 was not a leap year.

I’d exhausted the scientific approach, and I knew I’d have to bite the bullet and discuss some actual events. I had no idea what happened in the year I was born. Even if I could remember back that far, the fact that I was born at the end of October would have left only two months worth of material. I decided to start with general things, and hopefully become more specific as I went on.

1972 saw the continuation of some long-standing traditions of American life, such as Labor Day, celebrated on the first Monday of September, 1972.

This was all well and good, but at some point the teacher was going to expect some kind of information that pertained exclusively to the year in question. I decided the best I could do was list some things that I thought happened around 1972, and hope I got lucky.

Presidential scandal rocked the White House.

That was always a safe bet. My next bright idea was to reference an event that I knew was occurring in 1972, but about which I knew no actual details.

The Viet Nam War continued to rage in 1972. This conflict was a complex, hard to define series of events that experts today still find difficult to explain in a way that could make easy sense to the layperson. Any attempt to condense the happenings of even one year of that unfortunate period in American history and its implications would be foolhardy and even offensive to those who risked their lives in the name of freedom.

If figured Mr. Chesney, my history teacher, would be quite flattered by that last part considering he was a Viet Nam veteran.

I wrote a bunch of other stuff about Volkswagen Bugs and koulats, and somehow I’d managed to bluff my way through about 900 words. But if I wanted to ensure any kind of chance that the weaknesses of the essay could be overlooked, I knew I needed a killer closing paragraph. I couldn’t afford to merely repeat the sentiments expressed in the opening paragraph. I had to get personal about my own feelings about the year I was born, the sappier the better.

In closing, I would just like to express my own personal thoughts on the year in which I was not only born, but also conceived. Whenever I come across a person has been born a year behind or ahead of me, I must admit I look on them with just a bit of pity. I keep it to myself of course, but I have to wonder if they have any idea of just how close they came to being born in probably the single greatest year of the early 1970’s. Sure, ’71 and ’73 have their own merits; we all know that. But I love 1972. Yes indeedy.

The “yes indeedy” seemed a bit cheesy, but was in fact completely necessary, as they were words 999 and 1,000. I literally finished at the bell, walked into my history class, handed that puppy over to batty ol’ Mr. Chesney (Hanoi Harry we called him, though I think his first name was Ed), and sat at my desk, confident that I had once again managed another minor miracle of last-minute essay writing.

You might wonder what I kind of grade I was given. Well, worry not. You see, I went to a public school that spent money on new football uniforms every year while freshmen went without math books. Both Mr. Chesney and I knew that I had more than fulfilled my responsibility to the essay he assigned by my very acknowledgment that he’d assigned it in the first place. Actually completing it almost qualified as extra credit. Sure, I graduated at a far lower level of progress than I should have and spent the first two years of college learning things that I should have learned in middle school, but I loved my public school education. Yes indeedy.

The best thing about 2005 is that most everyone seems to agree that it wasn’t such a great year, and therefore I can join the rest of the world in choosing to put it behind me.

I’ve become wary of making grandly optimistic statements about the coming year, as I usually have to recant them by the third week in January. So I’ll temper my official decree a bit to merely say that I suspect that 2006 will not be the best year ever, only a solid fourth best ever, third best tops.

For instance, while I have no doubt that the coming months will bring some kind of financial windfall that will make it possible for me to quit my day job, as well as a sudden yet completely earned respect from my peers and enemies alike, not to mention nightly sex with countless beautiful women, I’m sure these things will be tempered by things like unexpected inclement weather, perhaps a flat tire, and the occasional unfortunate experience of being told about bad things happening to other people. The year is only three days old and already I’ve had to deal with the price of postage going up by two cents. The silver lining here is that I don’t mail many letters, so I can mark that as a bullet successfully dodged.

2006 already has many things going for it. The first thing that pops out to me is that it’s an even-numbered year. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that good things happen in years that can be evenly divided by two, otherwise Jesus would have simply been born a year earlier or later. Furthermore, I’ve always been a fan of the years ending in six. 1996 was a hoot, 1986 will always be the year that Howard Jones had a hit on the charts with “No One is to Blame,” and though I don’t remember 1976 all too well, it’s hard to imagine that I was very unhappy with an existence comprised of being fed when hungry, sleeping when tired, playing with toys, and drooling at will. I may just have to apply that line of thinking to the coming year.

I don’t plan on leaving the quality of 2006 up to mere fate and sheer numerology, however. The proactive steps I endeavor to follow in order to make this the fourth best year ever (fingers crossed for third best) include:

• Making my attraction to certain girls more obvious, mainly achieved through prolonged staring.
• Taking more plentiful and longer walks, thereby greatly increasing my chances of finding dropped money.
• No more staying up for twenty-four hours in a row doing Su Doku puzzles.
• Effective immediately: No more handshakes. Hugs only.
• Also, I’m going to work on better eye contact during conversations. No more looking into the eyes of the less judgmental person that I imagine to be standing to their immediate left.
• Public restrooms are no longer off limits; the bushes in the back of the establishment are.

2006. Look out world. And look out imaginary world, revolving just to the left of the real Earth.