THREENESS

I've decided to visit upon the world a radical new concept in self-improvement:

The Top Three List.

There are many, many benefits to the Top Three List, especially as opposed to the Top Ten List, but I will reduce them to Three (which number, in all its grammatical forms, will always be capitalized) in the Spirit of Threeness:

Reason #1: Most Top Ten lists are way too long.

Four stooges would have been one too many.

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Reason #2: I can't remember lists with more than Three things, anyway.

Reason #3: Three was good enough for the Trinity.

So let me start the "Year of Three," as it is already being called by breathless commentators, by explaining the Three Reasons.

Most Top Ten Lists Are Way Too Long.

If you have ever watched David Letterman, you will remember, perhaps, that during his Top Ten lists 7 out of 10 items on the list get a kind of polite golf laugh, like "ha ha (was I too loud there?)"

Most things need to be edited. Considerably. Especially self-help books. A personal favorite - "Children of the Self-Absorbed: A Grown-Ups Guide To Getting Over Narcissistic Parents." I'm not even sure what the title means.

Three French hens are perfect. Who knew what to do
with the turtle doves, anyway?

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Think about it. How much anxiety did you have in middle school trying to fill up two pages with thoughts about some historical character? So why be anxious? I will just cut to the chase and target Three suggestions at a time.

I Can't Remember Lists With More Than Three Things, Anyway.

This is a well-known fact in EO's life. This is the reason Mrs. Optimist always stops herself and says "I should write a list, shouldn't I?"

And she is right.

When we were first married (decades ago) I was offended by this. "What, do you think I'm so stupid I can't remember four things?" I said. Turns out I do not have sufficient RAM to remember more than Three things on a list. Sometimes when I am tired or chemically enhanced my list remembering capacity dwindles to two or less.

By contrast, Mrs. Optimist's list-remembering capacity is approximately two-dozen.

That is correct.

She is an excellent nurse, and before that, an excellent waitress, and all along a fabulous mom, all of which put a premium on being able to remember long to-do lists of entirely disconnected things with uncontrolled ids screaming for your attention.

It still amazes me.

I have been at the supermarket on several occasions with a cell phone in my hand, calling Mrs. Optimist for the Third or fourth item on the list I should have taken with me. This would be humiliating to the ordinary person, but I convert humiliation into irritation. That is my coping mechanism.

Three Was Good Enough For The Trinity.

One of the things we don't really understand about God is his Trinitarian nature - God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. Mother Church has spent 2,000 years pondering this essential fact, and still calls it a "mystery." That does not mean we do not understand anything about it. We just don't know all about it.

Why do God and quantum mechanics involve superposition mysteries we can't understand?
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This characterizes the advice-giving function, generally. If you solicit advice, it means you don't understand something important, and need to understand it better. Otherwise you wouldn't go to the trouble of asking for, and especially receiving, advice.

Good advice comes in small doses of powerful stuff. It needs to be small, because we need to be able to remember it, no matter how crazy the situation gets. And if it is good advice, it is powerful. It motivates us to change, which is very difficult and takes lots of energy. Sometimes good advice changes an entire life around. Sometimes good advice results in eternal life.

Like these words of Jesus: "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." Good advice - short, easy to remember, life changing. It involves three components, by the way: our repentance, his kingdom, and its propinquity.

So I am sticking with Threeness when dispensing advice this year. During criticism, normal logorrhea will govern.

REID AND PELOSI SITTING IN A TREE

K-I-S-S-I-N-G
First comes love
Then comes marriage
Then comes health care in a baby carriage

Back in BCT (Big Coldtown) for the holidays, EO perused the local newspaper. Call it the BCT News.

Mostly, EO likes to read the sports pages. Sports are controversial only within narrow boundaries. Who will win the BCS game? The Alabama Crimson Tide or the Texas Longhorns?

Roll, Tide, Roll. Sorry Longhorns fans.

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You get to find out right away. Simple.

Alabama fans. Simple. Happy.

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Not so with political and social problems. Years and decades go by before we get to compare results with predictions. Cause and effect are hard to diagnose, and so varied and complex that no immediate solutions suggest themselves, even if the diagnosis is spot on.

Reading an opinion piece in the BCT News, my head started spinning. The angry white Democratic newspaper columnist spent 10 sputtering column inches denouncing Republicans and telling Democrats how to win the fall elections, despite the growing unrest over health care reform.

Suggested talking points for Democrats were that

1. a Western European health care system will make us more civilized and humane,
2. anyone opposed to Obamacare is a heartless swine, intent on stiffing the poor,
3. it won't bust the budget, because the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says it will be paid for with new taxes and lots of cost savings, and
4. Republicans are hypocrites, because the Medicare prescription plan Bush II gave us in 2003 is in the red.

Ach.

Typical Republicans rushing to oppose health care reform.

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Some people who oppose the new health care legislation may be heartless barbarian swine, intent on oppressing the poor and wallowing in their hypocrisy, but not all fit the bill. None of the mud slung in the column actually addressed the facts. All the mud was just ad hominem ("against the person," not the argument). When someone resorts to ad hominem attack, it always means his logical arguments are not so good.

Here are a few reasons I oppose Obamacare. Actually, it should be called Reid/Pelosi Care (RP Care), since Obama had a comparatively minor role in creating the legislation. I will therefore give the program's actual authors their due.

Proud Parents of health care reform.
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Reason #1: I oppose RP Care because it is a huge expansion of Medicare/Medicaid, a system that has already metastasized wildly beyond all CBO predictions and threatens to bankrupt us.

Reason #2: I oppose RP Care because the federal government has shown no capacity for running a responsible health care insurance program. I don't believe it will suddenly gain that competence.

Doesn't matter if the government is Republican or Democrat, politicians are bad at health care and worse at health care insurance. President Johnson proved it first, and every administration since then has confirmed it, culminating with President Bush's 2003 expansion of Medicare prescription coverage, which is hemorrhaging debt as we speak.

This is not to say politicians don't mean well. They often do. They are just bad at health care and health care insurance.

Reason #3: I oppose RP Care because the promised cost savings are the same pious nonsense every new federal program claims in order to pass CBO's scoring system and not blow the budget. These cost savings are always based on eliminating "waste, fraud and abuse" and "controlling costs." This hasn't happened for 40 years, under Medicare/Medicaid. Quite the contrary, every decade we are "shocked, shocked," to find Medicare/Medicaid costs outstripping even our most outlandish predictions.

Now, suddenly, cost control will happen miraculously for RP Care, a much larger and more complex program than Medicare/Medicaid, because the bill says so.

"So let it be written, so let it be done." Pharoah, ca. 1500 B.C. Pigs flying, hippos dancing the mambo.

"I believe I can fly."

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The hyena will lie down with the lamb.

And will eat it.

Reason #4: I oppose RP Care because it will continue to inflate health care costs faster than the average rate of inflation (see "No We Can't" for more on this). This has happened for 4 decades with Medicare/Medicaid, under Republicans, under Democrats. If aliens from Neptune ruled, it would be the same result.

The Ood decide to subsidize health care.

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If the government puts a trillion more subsidy dollars into health care, why wouldn't the rate of medical inflation continue to exceed ordinary inflation? RP Care is an "answer" that actually worsens the problem, like getting another credit card to pay off the first one. Eventually that little scheme always has an ugly end.

We already subsidize health care for the poor. That's called Medicare. It's broke. Now we are going to subsidize the middle class. A lot more people in the middle class, my friends. Not gonna work.

Reason # 5: I oppose RP Care because we just got to see a lesson on federal subsidies gone wild. Remember the housing market, into which Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac injected steroids by making a market for sub-prime loans? All in the name of benefiting the poor? Did that inflate the cost of housing beyond the ordinary rate of inflation? Did that just blow up in our faces? Yes and yes. Ditto RP Care.

Results of sub-prime fusion experiments.

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Reason #6: I oppose RP Care because, based on our 40 years of experience with Medicare/Medicaid, the costs of RP Care will fast out-strip our ability and willingness to pay. It will put us in such a hole that the only way out will be to completely nationalize health care.

Reason #7: I oppose RP Care because we already know what nationalized health care will look like: VA and Military hospitals. Ever been in one? I have. I've had to spend years of my life wrestling with the inadequacies of health care in both settings. Perfectly fine people work there, but combine the efficiency of FEMA and the nurturing skills of the IRS and you get the picture.

Check out how the federal government takes care of its war heroes. Then ask whether the new Health Assurance and Hospital Administration (HAHA) will take better or worse care of the average schmo, like you or me.

Reason #8: I oppose RP Care because we just tore a bigger hole in the federal budget last year, buying up banks and auto companies, than we did for 8 years of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Whether the trillion dollars in new debt to finance the bail outs was necessary or not, I say clean up the existing credit card before signing on for a new one. (Check out the cool debt clock!)

* * *

So there you have it. Not everyone opposes RP Care because they are barbarian swine hypocrites intent on oppressing the poor.

Conan the Barbarian about to oppress the poor.

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Some people actually think it will be bad for America.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

What a wonderful Christmas! EO spent Christmas Eve at his sister's, where sister and brother-in-laws served up a sumptuous dinner in their delightfully Christmas-ee house, full of 9 and 10 foot ceilings, wooden floors and a very tall Christmas tree.

Not my sister and brother-in-law's house, but close.

Christmas morning was at grandpa/grandma's, where all EO's children (save the oldest, who is protecting our southern border along with her husband) were in attendance as we opened presents. What a delight! I told my absent daughter I get too absorbed watching everyone else open presents to remember my own, which has always served me poorly when the time comes for thank you notes.

Somehow the story of the King of the Universe being born in a manger touches people's hearts with a sense of joy and wonder. It really does cause our hearts to expand, and for the love of others to take root in our often cold and merciless souls. If the King of Universe can be so kind and so vulnerable, maybe so can we.

The Grinch after realizing the Spirit of Christmas was in the Whos' souls.

There is something wonderful about the accumulated traditions of Christmas, no matter all the excesses and commercialism. Giving gifts, being present in the lives of those we love, giving to those in need - these are all by-products of our meditation on and celebration of the birth of Jesus. Even our obvious mistakes have a certain charm when they represent our bumbling attempts at celebrating the love of the Savior.

The famous Leg Lamp from "A Christmas Story:"
Mr. Parker: "Fra-jee-lay? That must be Italian."
Mrs. Parker: "Uh, I think that reads "Fragile."
Mr. Parker: "Oh. Yeah."

So the next time you read a book by Richard Dawkins and listen to him celebrate the triumph of "bright" science over idiot Christianity, think about a life governed by 9th grade Physical Science teachers, where there is no Christmas.

Tell me who's got the better deal. I'll take Christmas - brought to you by Jesus, Mary and Joseph. And the Catholic Church. Thanks, guys.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!

MOVIES AND CHASMS

In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed, but they produced Michaelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love. They had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
So long, Holly.

- Harry Lime, "The Third Man."

Orson Wells, as Harry Lime

It's gettin' so a businessman can't expect no return from a fixed fight. Now if you can't trust a fix, what can you trust? For a good return you gotta go bettin' on chance, and then you're back with anarchy. Right back inna jungle. On account of the breakdown of ethics. That's why ethics is important. It's the grease makes us get along, what separates us from the animals, beasts a' burden,
beasts a' prey.
Ethics.

- Johnny Caspar, "Miller's Crossing."

Jon Polito, as Johnny Caspar

Watching "The Third Man" recently, I was struck by its relationships with "Miller's Crossing," which I watched a few weeks ago. The Third Man is a 1950 movie starring Orson Wells. Miller's Crossing is a 1991 movie by the Coen brothers. The similarities and contrasts were no doubt deliberate.

The Coen Brothers

The two movies feature almost incomprehensibly devious plots involving intricate deceits and betrayals. The plots serve as exposition and symbol of the lot of humankind, with its capacity for love and hellishness bound up in the same heart. In The Third Man, Holly Martin, an alcoholic writer of pulp Westerns, travels to Vienna to work for his old friend, Harry Lime, only to be confronted with the fact of Lime's recent "death." The truth about Lime's fraud scheme and faked death is slowly forced on Martin, until he decides to shoot Lime in the movie's climactic scene.

In Miller's Crossing, Tom Reagan advises his mob boss, Leo, to permit Johnny Caspar, another mobster who pays tribute, to kill Bernie Bernbaum, a bookie who has "cheated" Caspar by trading on inside information on a fixed fight. Leo rejects both Tom's advice, and Tom himself, after Tom confronts Leo with the news that Tom's been "cheating" with Leo's mistress, Verna Bernbaum (the bookie's sister). Tom, out in the cold, falls in with Caspar's gang, and is asked to "whack" Bernbaum as his initiation. Tom manages to fake Bernbaum's death in the lonely woods of Miller's Crossing. Bernbaum, ever the con, turns on Tom and blackmails him. Tom manages to survive, double crossing both Caspar and Bernbaum in the process, and in the movie's climactic scene, he executes Bernbaum.

Both movies proceed by the plot device of a "death" that is in reality a con. The slow moving camera in each film deliberately contrasts its visual calm with the feverish plot twists and moral dilemmas driving the characters. Each movie is set in a weirdly empty city: post-war Vienna, in The Third Man, and Prohibition New Orleans, in Miller's Crossing. In each case the oddly empty cities evoke the essential loneliness of the moral choices faced by the protagonists, Tom Reagan (in Miller's Crossing) and Holly Martin (in The Third Man).

The ominously deserted Ferris wheel, from The Third Man.

The ominously empty woods in Miller's Crossing.

Both movies culminate with the main character choosing to execute a scoundrel, a fraud and murderer, who has up until that point been the object of undeserved pity and mercy by the main character. In each scene the scoundrel is on the verge of once again evading responsibility for his crimes. Bernie Bernbaum, in Miller's Crossing, has just killed Johnny Caspar, his nemesis. Harry Lime, in The Third Man, has just evaded the police and is about to climb out of the sewers which have been his refuge throughout the movie.

In each movie the execution takes place despite the scoundrel's desperate plea for life. In Miller's Crossing Bernie Bernbaum pleads to Tom Reagan to "look inside your heart!" In The Third Man Harry Lime gives a beatifically lit, pleading backward look to his old friend, Holly Martin, as Lime desperately pushes against the sewer grate, moments from his escape. Both protagonists lose a part of their innocence and humanity, however misshapen, when they choose to execute the scoundrel. In each movie the protagonist's execution of the scoundrel is also a knowing renunciation of the possibility of love with the woman attached fervently to the scoundrel: Verna Bernbaum (in Miller's Crossing) and Anna Schmidt (in The Third Man).

Both executions are very personal, conducted in a claustrophobic one-on-one scene with no other witness present, driving home the point that moral choices are intensely individual, yet are always fraught with social consequences.

Of the two movies The Third Man is superficially the bleaker. It is shot in black and white, and much of it occurs at night and in the sewers beneath post-war Vienna. Miller's Crossing is shot in a strange, stylised color, heavy in browns and deep reds, in a New Orleans winter.

Harry Lime fleeing through Vienna's Sewers, from The Third Man.

Tom Reagan and Verna Bernbaum, in a scene from Miller's Crossing.

But the soul of Miller's Crossing is in fact the bleaker of the two. Holly Martin, in The Third Man, executes Harry Lime because he must, in order to affirm a rule of law in a lawless place. In the process Martin nobly sacrifices his own friendship and love.

By contrast Tom Reagan, in Miller's Crossing, kills Bernie Bernbaum at exactly the moment he no longer needs to, as an act of personal vengeance for a personal betrayal by Bernbaum. Bernbaum pleads with Reagan to "look inside your heart!" As Tom pulls the trigger, he responds "What heart?" Reagan's murder does nothing to affirm a rule of law. There is no rule of law in Miller's Crossing, only competing lawlessness and corruption, in the form of two opposing criminal organizations. Tom's ambivalent and hopeless self-assessment, at the end of the movie, says it all: "Do you always know why you do things, Leo?" We are left with no such doubt at the end of The Third Man, however painful the choice has been.

The difference in tone and moral conviction is marked by the last scene of each movie. In The Third Man, Holly Martin stops the car driven by the symbol of weary but determined morality, a military policeman. Martin gets out to stand and watch, silently, while Anna Schmidt, his lost love, walks toward the camera, on a dirt lane lined with barren trees. The policeman waits for Martin as he stands, a symbol of a muted and weary, but very much alive, moral code.

In Miller's Crossing Verna Bernbaum, Reagan's love, tells Reagan to "drop dead" as she walks from Bernie's grave. The camera follows as she drives away, down a dirt lane lined with barren trees. A few moments later Leo, the gangster for whom Tom held some shred of loyalty, walks away from the camera down the same lane, Tom having rejected Leo's offer to return and work for him. There is no car waiting for Tom Reagan. He is utterly alone as the credits roll.

The two movies are an insight into the great moral chasm we have crossed in a generation. The Third Man, in the shadow of WWII, was still able to affirm a morally correct choice, no matter how crippled the characters and how agonizing the choice. Holly Martin chose to sacrifice his own attachments for a higher good. Miller's Crossing, released in 1991, is only able to look on helplessly while competing criminals destroy themselves and murder one another to satisfy their personal lusts and sensibilities. Tom Reagan chooses, at the end, to deny any human connection at all, his hopeless and silent comment on the universal corruption of humanity.

The chasm between these two movies is the chasm between my parents' generation and my own.

The next generation - my children's generation - has a choice between these two opposing visions: God and the demands of objective morality, however painful, or the seductive worship of self, in all its loveless and sterile futility. I wonder how they will choose?

NICE KIDS

Mrs. Optimist and our optimistic children visited some friends this past weekend. Our friends have 8 children and 1 on the way. Both parents have their PhDs, which means the large brood is not the product of a lack of education. This is usually the second assumption of anyone who hears you have a large family. The first assumption is that you are Catholic. Which in this case is correct.

Big church. Big families.

Big families are kind of rare these days, if you haven't noticed. In our own case, we have only 5 children. We feel like lightweights when talking with our friends who have 8, or our other friends who have 10. Nevertheless, we are part of the fraternity, although we are clearly not top dogs.

Over the years Mrs. EO and I have been fascinated with the level of intimacy people adopt when they find out you have a large family. One of the first questions is usually "are you done yet?" Another question that gets asked is "haven't you heard of birth control? Ha Ha Ha." To which I normally respond "yes" and just stare. That's usually a conversation stopper. And this is fine by me.

"Yes."

I have a theory about the intrusive questions. I think people are both fascinated and repelled by the idea of having lots of children. A large family forces a whole panoply of uncomfortable issues to the forefront of people's minds - birth control, abortion, and tough economic decisions, like staying home from work.

And maybe all those children force you to confront the immense difficulties that attend child-rearing itself, and one's own sense of inadequacy. When somebody else has 2 or 3 times more children than you do, it tends to engender instant angst, especially if the children in the bigger family are relatively well-behaved and happy, and your own darlings are currently morose brats. Hence the goofy "questions" that are more like commentary.

Americans of my generation generally have done a worse job as parents than their own moms and dads. This cannot be easy on people's minds. The thing was, we had the best self esteem of any generation in history. We were certainly the smartest and the most morally enlightened generation ever; we said so constantly, during the '60s and '70s. We were obviously several levels of consciousness above our parents' generation, which consisted of corrupt, racist war-mongers (just for starters).

Talkin' 'bout my my generation.

For various reasons, things haven't gone so well lately. We have had far fewer children than my parents' generation. Sadly, we have raised more criminals, people with mental illness, suicides, and bums than my parents' generation did. Our divorce rate has all but guaranteed that our children will have more parent-generated problems than we did.

The difficulties don't end there. For the first time in American history, our children may be worse off financially than we were. Somehow, we have taken the richest country in the world and run it off the rails financially. A trillion here, a trillion there; it has started to add up to real money.

So, I would say the case for our "suckiness" as parents is strong. What makes it tougher still is that our immediate predecessors were the "Greatest Generation," who overcame the Depression (despite FDR), won WWII,

Quick, find Jane Fonda.

shed the Jim Crow laws handed down to them by their own parents, and created the most powerful and prosperous nation in the history of the world.

Curiously, they managed to stay married and raise big families, too.

Greatest generation liked big families.

My theory is this: when we hit our teens and twenties and wanted to rebel, the only options we had were bad ones. So instead of saving the world from totalitarianism, we worshipped Chairman Mao,

Killed a hundred million. What a guy.

smoked dope,invented AIDS,


legalized abortion, and institutionalized divorce and bankruptcy as secular sacraments.

Well played.

On the other hand, we also invented the internet, Caddyshack, blogging and YouTube. So we got that going for us.

Cinderella Story.

TO DREAM THE AMERICAN DREAM

Just got done a long, long trip on the Interstate with the wife (Mrs. Optimist), three large children and two dogs. We left before the sun came up and got home here in Hotville after the sun set. In between we were treated to a long meditation on home ownership, the great American dream.

Home + Pile 'O Debt = American Dream.

My new name for the place where I have lived these many years is BCT, which stands for Big Coldtown. Last Monday, back in BCT for a week, as I got off the train and walked the two blocks to my office there, I was armed with my super heavy, super warm leather jacket. The kind that can save your epidermis when you skid out on a motorcycle.

Maybe I should have worn the goofy hat, too.

Never mind: it was 50 degrees, the sky was the bleak, mustard-gas grey that covers BCT from November to May, and the wind was ripping in from the river at about 20 knots. As I walked the miserable two blocks to work, I was focused almost entirely on how stinking cold it was. There was just a small voice in my brain whispering "what a wimp! It's only 50 degrees!" It didn't matter - I was freezing.

Russian Front or BCT? Hard to tell the difference.

My shivering may have had to do with the cough, sneeze and runny nose I contracted 14 minutes after arriving in BCT. It may be from the mustard gas, I don't know, but this is one of the little treasures of living in BCT.

My sneezes were not so cute.

Shared misery always feels better.

That and the leaves from the massive old oak trees that surround our house. There are four of them. Each of these trees is at least 70 feet high, and each sheds its own weight in leaves each year. The leaves poured down on our house and yard in the months we've been in Hotville. I spent a day in October trying to fight back, but it only postponed the inevitable.

Pretty, but someone had to rake the leaves.

The entire time we were home in BCT over the Thanksgiving week, it rained. This is not uncommon in BCT; in fact, during the mustard-gas time of year, November through April, it is the norm. Except when it is snowing and sleeting. The gutters were filled with oak leaves (again, for the googleplex infinitieth time). And the solid week of rain plus the filled up gutters equals one thing: you guessed it, home-and-self-improvement projects.

It's self-improvement time, pardner.

The first project was the physical and spiritual battle I go through when cleaning leaves out of the gutters on the second floor roof. I used to do roof-repair for friends when I was young. Now that I have had family members fall and almost kill themselves (one from a roof, one from a scaffold), I hate roofs. In order to clean the second floor gutters, I crawl the last few yards down the roof on my belly, saying Hail Marys continually as I crab-crawl from one side of the roof to the other, removing the gargantuan clots of decaying leaves and acorns from my gutters. After a half hour of this the gutters were clean again, I had some spiritual growth, and I really wanted a whiskey.

After cleaning my gutters and my soul.

Of more consequence is that when the gutters are fouled with leaves, and the rains come down in buckets for a week, water wicks up from the helpless gutters into the asphalt shingles, soaking the roof like a wet mop. At some point the roof begins dripping down into the second floor plaster ceiling, like that same wet mop as you walk across the kitchen floor. Thing is, your kitchen floor is made for that, but our 80-year-old plaster ceiling is not. And VOILA! Home-and-self-improvement project number two for our vacation week: stripping the bubbled wallpaper off the ceiling in our bedroom.

Approximately our ceiling, after adding water.

This involved hooking up a garden hose and bringing it up to our bedroom, placing plastic drop cloths on the floor, and spraying the ceiling. Once it is nice and wet the wallpaper comes off grudgingly - a process begun by nature, through the saturated roof, but finished by Mrs. Optimist in one of those outbursts of home improvement happiness that is uniquely hers. I fill the role of the unenthused but persevering partner in most of these home improvement stories. This was no exception.

Mrs. Optimist is the slender one. Me, not so much.

Late in the evening the night before we were to drive home we finished stripping the paper and determined that the ceiling probably has to be dry-walled, not skim coated. Of course, this means we did not need to strip the ceiling, but how would we know that until we had stripped it?

Of course. That is what home-ownership is all about. Rain, oak trees, gutters, Hail Marys, wicking, dripping, and wall-paper stripping. And the desire for a whiskey.

To every man his Dew.

Which is why I love renting. Which brings us back, happily, to Hotville, where we arrived late in the evening after a very, very long ride begun at zero freezing dark thirty a.m. in BCT. Yes, sweet Hotville, where we rent a lovely apartment. Check that - we actually live in a lovely apartment for free, as part of the Department of Ginormousness sending me to this foreign and exotic climate to teach Ginormous employees how to think and act appropriately Ginormously.

We try to make new Lincolns. It doesn't always work out.

Our trip was uneventful, which for us, is eventful. After packing our little SUV in the early morning cold and darkness (I was reminded forcefully what it means to have your fingers get so cold you cannot tie a knot) and driving a few hours, the sun began to shine. It shone so brightly, after a while, that I took my jacket off. And then I began to perspire a little. Then I realized that we were traveling south, and it was indeed getting warmer and warmer. Much warmer and much warmer.

And I thought to myself, What a Wonderful World. Yeah.

Satchmo.

NERDY GUYS AND PRETTY GIRLS

I took the fam to a cutsy breakfast place today in Hotville. The place consisted of a nice cafe attached to a gourmet cooking store. It is very cool and very busy.

This is not the cutesy gourmet store. Just a cool picture.

I noticed something and thought I would pass it on to younger men who are nerds. There is no better place for a nerdy young man to meet beautiful women who are interested in him than in a vegetarian cafe.

First, there are not many guys there. Second, the girls are all fit with great looking skin, since they don't eat Kentucky Fried Chicken or Milky Way bars. Third, they don't like jocks at all. They like sensitive, skinny guys with sketchy facial hair who look like "projects."


That would be you, my friend.

Fourth, the girls talk fast and happy, because they drink chai all day and eat only vegetables. Therefore, nerdy guys don't actually have to carry any conversational load, other than periodic nervous laughter at a slightly deeper pitch than the girls' conversation.

Basically guys, all you have to do is brush your teeth and show up. And pretend you like vegetables. The great thing about that is if you only pick at your lima beans the girls will like you even more. They will think you are a soulmate, since they have been picking at their food all their lives.

Lima Beans: why vegetarians pick at their food.

They won't understand that you are dying for a cheeseburger and a chocolate milk-shake. They won't even think that, because they have never ever wanted a cheeseburger in their lives. They will think you are sad and that you've lost your appetite, and this will make you irresistible.

Why carnivores do not pick at their food.

I know, you don't like vegetables. And you want to be true to yourself. But right now you have no female companionship at all and none on the horizon. And being true to yourself, you have to admit you would like to at least talk to a pretty girl before you die. So you may want to consider vegetables.

Here's something to try for starters, to ease your way in: grilled ratatouille pannini with mozzarella and tomato, topped with pesto. Everyone can eat this, even carnivores.


So there you have it. If you learn to like vegetables, or even figure out a few go-to sandwiches you can swallow, you will have delightful female company for the rest of your life.

Trust me, Mrs. Optimist was a vegetarian and I had a sketchy beard. She's beautiful. And I am very happy.