Last night I had the strangest dream about being in our basement when all of a sudden, a black kitten with mange jumped out of the door to the furnace room and started running around. Neither Margaret nor I wanted to touch it, but it still needed to be put outside, so I kind of pushed it with my foot and booted it out the door. When I woke up, I started wondering what that was supposed to mean. I concluded that it meant one of three things: 1) the kitten symbolized children and Margaret and I both knew we had to deal with it but were loathe to touch the situation, 2) there's a hole in our basement wall that feral cats can get through, or 3) the kitten's mange symbolized my hair loss and how I don't want to confront that. It's probably the latter, since I just have to suck it up and boot the cat out of the house--just like with my youthful hair gets booted down the drain. Oh well--altering your genetics is still a few years away and my HMO probably won't cover it when it does become available--they're so cheap that they even charged me a $50 co-pay when they treated my rickets with leeches!

Actually, I was finally snapped out of my denial that I had inherited my grandfather's scalp just a few years ago. Despite years of my brother taunting me, I never thought it was THAT bad. Well, one day at work, someone I was meeting with had brought in her young daughter. A few days later the woman called to follow up on our meeting and she told me that her daughter had talked about "how funny that guy was." When she pressed her daughter about which guy she was talking about, the little girl replied, "you know--that half-haired guy!" I had to laugh, but it was then that I realized that I would never have George Clooney's hair unless it was glued to my head.

Speaking of halves, one time my niece was introducing Margaret and me to her friend and she said, "This is my uncle Jeremy. He's half Indian and half human." When I told both stories to my grandmother, she said, and don't forget: you're also a half-wit. Thanks B!