* The other day I was driving on the freeway, and a woman in a mini-van cut me off rather rudely. I honked but saw no response whatsoever, so I switched to the next lane over and accelerated back to my original speed. As I pulled alongside of her, I realized why she hadn’t noticed me or my bright blue KIA – she had one finger completely buried up her left nostril and was, apparently, totally immersed in trying to latch onto her brain and pull it out her nose. Gross.

* I committed homicide the other day. Well, okay, seagull-icide. It was a freak accident, and the absolute freakishness of it was all that kept me from feeling gut-wrenching guilt all day. You know how seagulls (and most other city birds) sit on the road until a car is almost on them, then take off in a blinding blur of feathers but somehow always manage to fly clear of the vehicle? Well, this one dropped the snack he’d picked up on the street, and went back down to get it just as his friends cleared my hood. One other rolled up and over the car but made it; unfortunately, the first guy was done for. PETA, come lock me up.

* I love NPR. I frickin’ love it. I’m a total geek, I know, and I don’t care. I love Fresh Air, Talk of the Nation, This American Life, the BBC News Hour, Day to Day, the works. However, I (like many others) do not love pledge week. Or, in the case of Chicago Public Radio, pledge purgatory. Two straight weeks of unfettered begging and pleading by everyone who works at the station for those of us who listen to give, give, give some more, give this amount and you’ll get an unbreakable umbrella, give even more and you’ll get to watch the 4th of July fireworks on the roof of a downtown skyscraper. Yes, I donated. And then I was still forced to listen to the day-in, day-out monotony of the pledge drive. Couldn’t they have a password-protected station that you could listen to, uninterrupted, after you’d donated? Or at least use the regular announcers to talk during pledge week, because whoever decided that the people behind the scenes – the ones who aren’t ever the voice on the radio, who have no skill whatsoever in verbal communication, and who get nervous when placed in front of a microphone – should suddenly become the voice on the radio – that person deserves to be drug out into the street and forced to listen to pledge week.

* Speaking of NPR, one of the few actual bits of news I managed to catch was the recent decision by the Supreme Court to lift a 30+ year ban on gun ownership in Washington, DC. The implications of this decision are potentially massive, or potentially minimal, but I believe one man said it best when asked about the types of guns that will now be allowed in DC homes and glove compartments. If you’re talking about machine guns, he said, it’s pretty unlikely that any city or state government will allow your average citizen to carry them around. “But if you’re talking about semi-automatics, I mean, everybody’s got a few.” Um…yikes.

* I used to love trains. I now abhor them. Last week, I swear the train god was out to get me. Every single day – seriously, every single day – I was forced to sit at one railroad crossing or another, watching a seemingly endless string of freight cars chug by at quite possibly the slowest rate that anything can go without leaving the “in motion” category altogether. Mostly, this happened at 2am when I was so tired that I barely stayed awake for the caboose.

* And, while not really a thing that makes you go “uh…” or anything, I have an announcement to make:

I finally finished reading Harry Potter.

That’s right, the whole 7-book series, in hard-cover, all the way from start to finish. It took me a few months (mainly because I only read the books during Saturday morning breakfast at IHOP or on rare restful Sunday afternoons), but I’m done. And now I really want to talk to someone about the whole thing, Snape and Voldemort and Dumbledore and why on earth J.K. Rowling decided to make the epilogue occur a full nineteen years after the story ended. Alas, I don’t want to ruin it for anyone who hasn’t yet gone the distance and is waiting for the last few movies to come out. So email me. Or comment. Or something.