Jeong-A is not a charming globe-trotting Korean lawyer who just quit her job in Hong Kong, but is actually a middle-aged Australian professor of semantics whose wife left him because he spends all his time chatting on the computer with what he thinks are young women, but are in fact middle-aged men like himself posing as young women.

When I was small and my little brother even smaller, he ate some thyroid pills my grandmother had left out on a counter at her house. We got to watch him get his stomach pumped at the hospital, through a tube stuck down his nose. A nun spoke to me, which was a bit frightening as I wasn’t used to nuns.

So I should have expected this to happen: I left my Irish traditional music CDs out and now Gamma has discovered her love for traditional Irish music. No more Xtina or Shakira for her. There’s a stack of CDs of jigs and reels and slow airs in the kitchen now, next to the CD player.

I come home rather late from work nowadays so it’s mostly over by the time I get home, but sometimes Alpha is still hanging from the ceiling by her finger- and toenails. The only mitigating detail in this for Alpha is that Gamma seems to have good taste, and plays the better-quality stuff.

So my daughter Beta attends a school so cool that they got a famous Austrian artist to come give a talk to the kids. Hermann Nitsch, I’d love to see him in action once. I would go to great lengths to hear him speak. Not as far, say, as leaving work early and going to my kid’s school, but you know. Who wouldn’t want to see someone throw a couple buckets of blood around?

Beta’s really enthused, too.

Girl: Eh, Nitsch.
Man What do you mean, eh? It’ll be fuckin’ amazing. The guy’s brilliant.
Girl: [Stares at man over her glasses, only she's not wearing glasses.]
Man What? I’m serious! Go listen to the guy, by all means! Do yourself a favor.
Girl: Don’t ask him what he earns.
Man What?
Girl: Our art teacher told us not to ask him what he gets for a painting.

Man Heh. So of course you’re not going to.
Girl: I’m going to ask him if he does birthday parties.

Briefly I considered writing a serious post about being hypnotized but the sort of corny humor inherent in hypnosis just makes it impossible. Also, the story gets a little personal and nobody here wants to hear personal stories, right.

Nevertheless, I was hypnotized last night, or something very much like it.

I watched “K-Pax” a couple weeks ago, and there is a scene where Jeff Bridges hypnotizes Kevin Spacey by counting him down from five, and brings him back by counting him back up. I watched that scene and was all like, Oh sure, no watch?

Well, last night this person who hypnotized me didn’t even count me down from five. He didn’t even tell me I was being hypnotized, for that matter, which makes me wonder whether I was actually hypnotized or something else, hence the disclaimer in the second half of the first paragraph up there.

OTOH, he did count me back up from 5 to 1, which made me think, “Holy shit, I’ve been hypnotized!!!” (Verbatim quote, BTW, from around “4”).

Don’t ask me what went on in between, because I haven’t the faintest idea. I may have been doing naked George Burns impressions for the staff for all I know, although I did not smell of cigar smoke. Also, there was no staff. Anyway, another Kevin Spacey moment in my life.

It was really amazing; at least, I was really amazed. I still am.

Have you ever been hypnotized?

Just when certain positive life changes conspire to make one feel less Bug-like, threatening the very existence of a certain on-line “comic strip”, school starts again, and with it long drives into the city with a teenager.

If Iraq descends into a civil war, will Bush get to count it as one of his?

Provisional results of the ongoing Metamorphosism research project on how to attract people, executive summary:
Subject M, 45-year old male

• Crazy people: Leave your heart chakra too wide open. Winos and crazy people would generally pick Subject M out of a crowd to share their life story, or plans for mass murder or other revelations until Subject M learned to close his heart chakra. The drawback of this method is, if you close your heart chakra to avoid attracting these people, then your heart chakra is closed.

• Men: Lose ten pounds. Since he lost the weight, lots of guys have been flirting with Subject M. Or at least more than before, if not “lots.” Depends on your definition of “lots”.
• Hedgehogs: Build cute little houses and leave food out. They’re such little bums. Also, open your heart chakra.
• Beautiful women: Fart in your office. The effect is like rubbing a lamp and a genie appears. Worked for Subject M twice yesterday; both times, attractive co-worker appeared out of nowhere, entered office, sat down and did not leave again until she had smoked half a pack of menthols and explained how easy it is to change the locks on a door, she does it all the time when her husband walks out after a fight, she keeps fresh locks in a drawer in her apartment just in case.