The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Way I Feel

Disgusted. The very wet and (until recently) very warm weather seems to have encouraged every type of vermin and pest -- save rats, praise the Cosmic Muffin -- to encroach upon my domicile. In the five years we've lived here, we've never had roaches until this summer. And until last winter, we didn't have much of a mouse problem either. At the time, I thought the mice were coming inside to escape the cold, but we seem to have more than ever now, here, at the tail end of summer. I wonder if mice are gradually evolving toward intelligence. They seem to be smart enough to evade every sort of trap we've set for them. The ultimate solution would be to get a cat, I suppose, but someone in my family is allergic to animal fur, especially feline fluff. Maybe we could get one of those hairless cats, but they're so damn ugly and as creepy, in their own way, as mice.

Confused. Someone, a person I see almost every weekday, asked me if I had just received a haircut today. Now, I haven't had a haircut since late June, when I was almost buzzed bald by an eccentric Brazilian hairstylist who apparently has trouble following simple directions. So I said, no, I haven't had a haircut. "Oh, have you been wearing a hat then?" this person asked. "It looks matted down." I didn't know how to respond to that. I hadn't been wearing a hat, and a recent glance in the loo's mirror hadn't revealed anything out of the ordinary about my still rather short coif. So I ran my fingers through my hair and fluffed it up a bit in a mocking way, and everyone laughed. I guess you can see someone every day for years, but not really see him at all, until a random moment of undistracted clarity strikes and you suddenly picture the guy as he is in the moment, instead of your mentally prepackaged image from months ago.