Magical Moment

Today I finally took a close look into the junk left behind in the abandoned office next door. The previous occupant's Magic 8-Ball, alone on the table, seemed especially forlorn to me. Why, I wondered, would anyone leave behind such a critical decision-making tool? Cod knows I never go anywhere without mine.

Then I asked whether the internal candidate applying for the job would wind up getting it, and turned it over. The answer: NOTHING. The little answer doohickey inside, that floats in the blue/black predictive salsa, only gives you the pointy end. The pointy end is hanging way out of the salsa, so what you actually see is a white PENTAGON. A pentagon with 5 conflicting answers written on it, sloshing back and forth as you shake it so you can see them all. Shake it again, and you get 5 different answers to choose from. I hardly know whether to douse it in kerosene and light it up, or build an altar to it.

That is so totally life in a nutshell.

Happy Birthday, My Dearest Love

So yesterday I get home from work, right, and there are two identical-looking letters from the hospital. I open them up, and I find two different items, mailed a day apart from the same address (one I have never been to) in a vast and spreading hospital chain:

One told me that I was more than a year overdue for a routine screening, and that if I delayed any longer my firstborn child would be the Antichrist (this is a Catholic hospital).

The other congratulated me on my recent screening and announced that their highly-trained staff had found no "significant" abnormalities in the results. Implying that an embryonic Antichrist, give or take, might not raise their eyebrows too much.

Life is good sometimes.