I've been amazed by so many things as of late. I was amazed when the Supreme Court struck down a Texas anti-sodomy law last year. I was amazed by the recent Massachusetts court decision saying that gay marriage could not be prohibited under the state constitution. And I was amazed when San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom began marrying same-sex couples a few weeks back. Maybe, I thought, this country is not totally, mind-numbingly hopeless after all.

For our first wedded Valentine's Day, Nick bought me my very own copy of Harold and Maude, the 1971 Hal Ashby film in which a young man falls in love with an octogenarian. I maintain that this is the most romantic movie ever made (although Steven Shainberg's quirky Secretary comes in a close second). Forget the sappy, weirdly jingoistic Casablanca. Forget Gone with the Wind, which is racist, sexist, and way too long. H & M is the real deal.

Why do automakers keep branding their vehicles with these ludicrous names? Some of them sound grandiose, but when reduced to their basic etymological form, mean nothing. Some of them clearly mean nothing to begin with. The most ambitious names are the ones that bug me most—they seem to have been haphazardly lifted from the pages of a seventh-grade social studies book. For starters, there's the Aztek, which seems to be strategically misspelled so as to prevent the descendants of this once-great empire from coalescing into a mighty guerrilla force and burning down the manufacturing plant. I bet this gas-guzzling monstrosity isn't quite what they had in mind back in Tenochtitlan. As a bonus, the Aztek looks like a Honda CRV that has been hooked up to a helium pump for too long. Then there's the fearsome Rubicon, which is a new and alarming flavor of SUV. The name is promising—it's both a historical and mythological allusion—but the problem is that the Rubicon was actually a river (dividing Gaul from Italy). The idiom being referenced is "crossing the Rubicon," which is what Julius Caesar did when he decided to invade Italy. See the conflict? The actual Rubicon is something that needs to be crossed, rather than something that does the actual crossing. It's confusing, but the manufacturers don't care about that. They're already working on their next fuel-inefficient masterpiece.

There's no point in denying it anymore. ER is a soap opera. I've been watching it on and off for the past few years, and I've always liked the rare combination of intelligence, human interest, and cool medical procedures (back in the day, I used to watch the Surgery Channel). Recently, though, the ER overlords have been raising the stakes. The melodrama keeps escalating, getting more and more out of control, so that pretty soon they'll have nowhere left to go. From that great moment when Dr. Romano got his arm amputated by a helicopter blade (I was watching this at the gym, and an entire row of runners tripped on their respective treadmills when it happened—beautiful), ER seems to have become less a serious medical drama and more a theater of the absurd. Ionesco himself couldn't have been prouder of the way the show is turning out, although he might have suggested turning Dr. Dave into a rhinoceros.

How many more times must I endure this nonsense? As if the music box debacle wasn't enough, I now have another instrument ascended from the fiery pits of hell to torment me. What's at work here is a conspiracy of Dantean proportions.

My alumni magazine arrived today, and it got me thinking about old times. Or, as Shakespeare put it, for "my salad days, when I was green in judgment." For the love of all that is holy, people, don't choose English as your major unless you are prepared to suffer. There's a reason there are more English majors at your local fast food joint than any other type of college graduate. There's a reason Garrison Keillor makes jokes about English majors working menial jobs and diagramming sentences just to freshen up their skill set. It's because English departments attract the kind of people who are dreamers, who are so right brained they can't manage to coordinate their socks, and who are too absorbed in their Victorian novel to pay the heating bill. I know this, of course, because I was one.

Paris, 1900. From the moment the show began—all sepia and grainy like an old silent film—I was charmed but wary. Would the much-touted Moulin Rouge be too self-consciously vintage? Would its preciousness disgust me? What would the sets look like? Why have I never noticed how much Ewan McGregor resembles Kenneth Branagh? (It must be the beard.) Should I go to the bathroom now, or wait until the halfway point?

My wife loves Capone. Thinks he's the sexiest man alive. I see him on Clark Street today when I'm out with my cart selling fresh flowers. Daisies, gardenias, hollyhocks, I've got 'em all. And I'm seeing lots of business, seeing how every poor schmuck wants his girl to think he's a romantic on the Big Day. It's cold like February always is, and I'm shivering in my big overcoat that almost reaches down to my brogans.

Apparently, some exhibitors have been accused of putting hairpieces on their show cattle at the Ohio State Fair last year. What this means is that they took excess hair from the cow's body—from other cows, even—and strategically glued it to other spots in order to give the animal a more healthy and proportional appearance.

I just finished re-reading a children's book called The Girl with the Silver Eyes, by Willo Davis Roberts, and it brought back a deluge of memories. The heroine in this book is a 10-year-old girl with telekinesis, and when I first read it, I thought this ability would be about the coolest thing ever (second only to meeting that dreamy boy from Flight of the Navigator). So I tried to do it. I tried to move stuff with my mind. But the results were disappointing, to say the least. It just wasn't fair, I thought. Why couldn't my mom have taken a dangerous, experimental drug when I was gestating, so that I would end up with bizarre abilities that would make my classmates fear me? (Children have a natural Machiavellian sensibility, which is why they go all "Lord of the Flies" every time a bunch of them get stranded on an island together.)

Man, do I love Independence Day. Alien attack movies are always fun, but this one is the best because it has more destruction scenes than all the others put together. Will Smith is mouthy as always, Randy Quaid is in rare, redneck form, and there's enough Jeff Goldblum to muck up a lifetime of fly paper ("help me, please help me"). Data McStar-Trek is funny as that freaky Deadhead scientist, and Bill Pullman is the goofy, incorruptible president we all wish we had. And in a film like this, there is no such thing as nuanced portraits of good and evil, so when That One Guy first appears as the Secretary of Defense, he might as well be wearing an eye patch and chortling "bwoo-ha-ha-ha!"

Recently, I have begun to suspect that I have a mild form of hypergraphia, that insidious neurologic disorder that dampens a person's impulse control, causing him or her to write obsessively. It can be rated on a scale of 1 (nagging preoccupation, can't go more than a few days without writing) to 10 (Stephen King). I have to admit, if this is true, it's kind of a cool affliction to have. I always wanted some sort of debilitation or tragic moral failing to give me credibility as a writer—something like gambling or womanizing or the compulsion to collect excess fertilizer on weekends and shape it into tall, grooved mounds like Devil's Tower.

Recently, I had to let go of a beloved pair of brown Doc Marten hiking boots. These boots were a full eight years old, and they had been worn so many times that the once-stiff side panels were all slouchy. When you looked at them sitting together on the floor, they seemed to be scrunching up their little noses, as if repelled by their own increasingly pungent stench. This was all part of their working class charm.