Married people are often full of advice, solicited or not, on how singles should go about looking for a mate. Someone once suggested that I spend Saturdays in a seminary library, waiting for a nice theologically minded man to approach. But male friends have told me that a man with class is not likely to pursue a woman who is a complete stranger to him. Of course, there are always those bold ones who dare to take the risk, but generally they're not the type you want to spend any amount of time with. Once I was approached at the Motor Vehicle Division by a down-and-out sort who said, unsmiling, "You sure look pretty. I hope someone better than me tells you that today." I wasn't sure if I felt complimented by that or not.

Children are introduced to reading with simple, pleasant stories - books with sunny titles like Rain Makes Applesauce and Goodnight Moon. It's a trick. Once you've mastered reading skills and are well into your school years, they replace the feel-good stories with bleak tales of death and despair. Jack London's "To Build a Fire." Herman Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener." Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery."

"The Lottery" tops my list of grim literature from my school days. (If you're not familiar with it, it's the story of a New England village engaged in an annual public lottery in which the "winner" is stoned to death by the rest of the villagers.) I never actually read the story, but was subjected to the film instead - three times, during the years spanning junior and senior high school.

I was well into adulthood when I discovered another Jackson work, "About Two Nice People," a sweet love story first published in Ladies Home Journal. Now why couldn't they have picked that story as a repeated curriculum offering? All that money I now spend on psychiatric treatment could have gone toward a nice Dr. Seuss collection instead.

A few years ago, a group of geneticists moved into my office suite. The jokes started as soon as my coworkers and I found out they were coming. We pictured a bunch of social misfits with out-of-date clothing and intense stares, with secret cloning experiments going on behind closed doors. Someone wrote an ominous warning on a dry-erase board in the hallway: "The geneticists are coming! The geneticists are coming!" Someone else scrawled, "Stop cloning around!" But they turned out to be completely normal, and some of the nicest people I've ever worked with. The only time I wondered about them was when I ran across a box in our storage area marked Genetics. Do not open.

I still wonder what was in that box.

It was 111 degrees today, even though technically it's still spring. It helps to repeat, "It's a dry heat...it's a dry heat...it's a dry heat...." Not that it makes you feel any cooler. It just passes the time, bringing you a few seconds closer to fall (which, of course, won't really be here until December).

Life Lesson Du Juor: The interval of time between accidentally dropping your keys into the trunk of your car, and when your brain recognizes that the dropping of keys has occurred, is just long enough to allow you to shut the trunk lid. (The interval of time between this unfortunate occurrence and the arrival of roadside assistance is a bit longer.)

I don't have any impressive accident or injury stories. No broken bones. No impalements. Not so much as a simple sprain. And the only real scar I have is a barely visible one on the back of my wrist, from a vicious game of "Spoons."

I lead a sheltered life.

Why are orphans always described as “plucky” when they’re the subject of a novel or film? Is there something about being orphaned that causes one to develop pluck? And why does it seem that only orphans seem to have this particular quality?

These are the things that keep me up at night.

A description I ran across for a soon-to-be-released Christian romance novel:

Anne Gardiner struggles living as a gentleman's daughter on a pauper's means. When wealthy Robert Weston comes visiting, Anne accidentally topples from a ladder into his arms. Her eccentric father, the "Colonel," demands honor and a hasty "marriage" for Anne. Her reputation tarnished by rumors and the Colonel's accounts of events, Anne and Robert search for solutions. Is a real marriage the answer?"

Let me guess - they all live happily ever after?

I really want to see “The Sum of All Fears,” but wonder if that’s such a good idea, since I already have a recurring dream about nuclear war. (I have another recurring dream where I wake up and my hair is suddenly long. My dream life alternates between horrific and shallow.)

When I was working for a small newspaper years ago, my boss approached me with what seemed to be a simple grammar question:
“Is there an apostrophe before the s in don'ts?”

I looked up from my desk, visualized the word in my mind, and said, “No.” I pulled a book titled Do’s and Don’ts of Writers and Speakers from a shelf in my office and offered it as proof. I was satisfied, but my boss was puzzled, noticing the inconsistency between the two words.

“If do’s has an apostrophe, doesn’t don’ts?” she asked, and I tried to offer clarification.

“Do’s does, but don’ts doesn’t,” I said, smiling at my unintentional tongue-twister. “If do’s does, why doesn’t don’ts?” she asked. The conversation sounded more ridiculous with each new sentence, but I made one final attempt to explain the discrepancy.

“Do’s does, because it doesn’t ....”

By then we were laughing too hard to continue exploring the mysteries of the English language, but I think she finally took my word for it.

At article about this evening's partial solar eclipse reminded me of the confusion I had about eclipses when I was in grade school. I reasoned that since a full solar eclipse would bring darkness during daytime, a lunar eclipse would cause just the opposite: daylight in the middle of the night. It seemed perfectly logical at the time.

My friend Mark was lamenting the fact that his wife wouldn’t let him name his dog Tweedy after Jeff Tweedy of the band Wilco. Here was the conversation that followed:

Me: You can’t name a dog Tweedy. That sounds like a bird’s name.
Mark: You know who had a dog named Tweed, don’t you?
Me: Oswald Chambers.
Mark: I thought it was C.S. Lewis.
Me: No, it was Oswald Chambers. I can’t picture C.S. Lewis with a dog.
Mark: I can - with a tweed coat and patches on the sleeve.
Me: The dog?
Mark: Yeah. And a pipe.