So guess what? My car wouldn't start this morning. The radio and lights came on like usual, but where I should have heard that beautiful sound of the engine sparking, I just heard this awful chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga sound. Chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga. When we lifted the hood, this is what we were faced with:

Me zombie. Name Orwell. Me born long time ago, die, then go into ground. One morning, terrible noise wake me. Like God fingernails on big chalkboard. (Me literary—want write poem book one day.) Me stand up in graveyard, see other zombies standing, too. Moon out, and air full of green fog. Music play like at carnival. Weird.

"What do now?" me ask.

Other zombies shrug. "Guess eat brains."

Well, it's finally happened. The National Geographic channel has started pandering to the lowest common denominator. Lately, if you watch any program on NGC, the tone of the narration resembles the crazed rhetoric of late-night police chase shows. The libretto for National Geographic's "World's Most Dangerous Jobs" goes something like this: "But little did these firefighters know that they were in the gravest danger, for death was just over the ridge, waiting to envelop them. The fire blazed savagely up the south side of the mountain, engulfing with raging fury everything in its path. Who could escape its murderous rampage? When we return, find out who will survive the inferno."

I just found something incredibly neat. If you visit reasonablyclever.com, you'll find a neat little interface where you can build a Lego person that looks like you. Different hair, different skin tones, different "clothing" and backgrounds—it's the coolest thing I've seen all week. Below is me, as rendered in Legovision. Please note the dazzling Wonder Woman tiara.

I'm currently writing a story about a female gunslinger, so I figured it'd be fun (and useful!) to absorb myself in the Wild West persona. Step one: cowboy boots. I've lived in Kansas all my life, but I've never owned a pair of cowboy boots. I figured they'd be incredibly uncomfortable—the authentic ones have those pointy, cuneiform-shaped toes, and they look like they might do more damage to your tootsies than the slickest pair of Jimmy Choos. I was wrong. Nick and I went to Nigro's this weekend, a cowboy wonderland in Kansas City, and I bought this fabulous and comfortable pair of distressed-leather boots. Why are they so distressed, you may ask? Because they can't stand being so sexy!

I was looking around my office today, and I happened to meditate on the overwhelming abundance of plants. We actually have people on staff whose only job is to keep our captive flora hydrated. Plants are virtually everywhere in this building—on the file cabinets, forming little oases between cubie clusters, and in the hallway by the elevator. You see them just inside the glass entrance doors on the bottom floor, and in the room where job hunters fill out their copious applications. Most of these plants will never see genuine sunlight, and that makes me sad. Day after day these poor plants subsist beneath the cruel glare of fluorescent lights, never getting the opportunity to engage in authentic photosynthesis. They enrich our lives with their beauty, produce oxygen for us to breathe, and remove noxious gases from the air. What do we give them in return? A stick of stale plant food and a pat on the leaves.

It's shameful.

And I want to set them free.

See Kyle, a 45-year-old construction worker from Duluth, face off with an El Monterey beef and bean red chili frozen burrito. Who will be triumphant in this unsavory smackdown?!?

The first phase is no contest: The burrito will be placed in the microwave oven for 1 minute, 15 seconds, and then will be allowed to cool for another two minutes. If Kyle is able to suspend all sense of taste, possibly by holding his nose, he will almost certainly succeed in masticating and ingesting the entire frozen burrito. This is like climbing to base camp on Everest—it requires no exceptional skill. But once the last bite of the beef and bean red chili frozen burrito has been swallowed, the true battle begins.

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.

Spirit: Look, NASA, I love you and everything. I just don't think this long-distance thing is going to work.

NASA: But I'm the one who sent you there! I sacrificed for you, so that you could have everything you wanted, so that you could see the stars.

Spirit: Yeah, but now that I'm here . . . I just feel so restless. I feel like I need to . . . well . . . rove for awhile.