New menu. No new choices.

My brain has gotten all muddy. Cramped with concern. Swelling with urgency. Dull with pragmatism. Percolating with ambition and the split rays of unfocused desire. I even forget sometimes to look forward to the things I never fail to enjoy. I forget to grasp onto the enduring hope that tonight is the night I get to see a good friend and a favorite performer, thinking instead of all the plates I'm failing to keep spinning and also dreading the Baked Honey Chicken. It's sickeningly easy to sour the milk of optimism. And not in any sort of delicious cheese or sour cream sort of way.

I cut my finger badly yesterday. Not on one of my new knives. Rather on one of my old knives that had to be put away to make room for the new knives and their gargantuan housing. As knife blocks go, this one is a mansion. These knives live in splendor. But the other displaced knives, banished to live out the remainder of their rust-attracting existences in the jangly bottom of a drawer that jerks when you try to open it, had their revenge on me last night. I was having trouble getting the drawer open, and I realized that my very fancy cheese grating device had lodged itself in such a way as to block the drawer from opening but a fraction of the way. I thrust my hand in to shove the other gadgets and utensils aside, pressing with great force against the exposed blade of a knife I once wielded. And it was sharp enough to cause me great harm and to make me wonder if the knives I now have are really so superior. (Trust me: they are. I had to slice tomatoes later in the evening and my faith was restored -- it was like magic!) I hurried to the bathroom to plaster an Anakin Skywalker as Pod Racer bandage (they were on sale a long time ago) on my bird finger, dripping blood all over the sink and delaying the completion of my Indian dinner preparation. I'm fine now. But my finger is sore. And Lenny Bruce is dead.

I'm looking after a friend's dog this week. She's lovely and affectionate and awfully nice to have around. She's dozing in the living room with Ghost World on the television. She's a canny one, that Cosette. Also, I heard Ghost World being promoted on a pay channel today. They were giving the evening line-up and announced it as a "dark comedy," and I found myself in disagreement. But before I began investing time and effort fashioning a cogent refutation, I remembered that labels are crap and seldom informative and summing anything up as the actual category into which you can best chuck it is lazy and dismissable. And maybe I'm more keyed up on the topic because of recent arguments stemming from the use of words like "conservative" and "liberal" and "right-wing" and "hot," but I'm entitled to prickle at the sound of our language as much as the next guy. I also do not read the TV Guide.