About four years ago I had surgery on my right hand for carpal tunnel syndrome. The surgery was successful and I haven’t been plagued anymore with the pain and numbness that beset me for a couple of years before the surgery. My left hand has since progressed to almost that same point – numbness when I type, hold a hairdryer , drive, anything. My attitude toward elective surgery has changed, however, in the past few years, after a co-worker lost a good portion of the functioning of one lung when a blood clot lodged there following some minor surgery. Anyway, the point of this ramble is that the new wonder-phone makes my left hand numb and crampy as soon as I begin to use it’s microscopic keyboard. When I say “as soon as” I mean within a few nano-seconds of picking the thing up. It would seem that I just can’t find any device that is a manifestation of technology that satisfies me.

I need to get a pair of glasses to keep with me in the car. I've become entirely dependent on reading glasses and can no longer focus on anything written that is smaller than about an inch in height. You would think that I could easily address this need for glasses by simply buying a pair at CVS (in addition to the 9 pairs I already own). My innate frugality comes into play, however, and I refuse to purchase another pair until CVS has a "buy one get one free" sale (not that I really need two pairs right now, but I'm sure there will be some other location that will cry out for a pair in the near future).

Do you remember the movie A Beautiful Mind? I'm beginning to worry about the number of patterns I'm seeing around me. Sitting here in the car waiting while Caitlin has her guitar lesson, I noticed 3 other cars parked near me with the following sets of letter in their license plates: EXY, ERX, EYG. The overlap of the E, X and Y struck me - I had an actual conscious thought about these letters. Completely meaningless and random. Sometimes I wonder about the things I could accomplish if my brain was actually used for good instead of, well, nothing. Remember the movie Defending Your Life...? See what I mean?

Movies: Man on the Moon. Another movie I was ready to give up after about a half hour. Andy Kaufman was a desperately incomprehensible person, and his comedy or performance art or whatever it was he did that he believed was entertainment was just as unfathomable. I read Roger Ebert’s review of this movie and he commented on how he forgot that Jim Carrey was inside the portrayal of Andy Kaufman. I never once forgot it was Jim Carrey – perhaps it was that he didn’t really look like Andy Kaufman, or at least what I recall he looked like, or maybe it was because Jim Carrey’s style of humor is so recognizable and leaked through this characterization. A straightforward movie about a very odd person.