It takes a lot of brains to stay this clueless...

...to paraphrase Dolly Parton.

The Big Boy is out of town; the kids are at Bible School and spending the night out. Had I a life, I would be out setting the world on fire. As it is, I'm roaming around here lost...anticipating reinstalling the closet hardware the roofers knocked down with their pounding a couple of weeks ago.

The excitement is barely bearable.

But I've been thinking lately about just how really clueless I am and I'm telling you...it's a lot nicer place in here. There are some things I...have problems with (other than why Blogger tells me I'm "previewing" when it's gonna do whatever the hell it wants to.) Therefore, here is my list of Things I Just Don't Get:

Amy Winehouse...She reminds me of one of those creatures you instinctively step on and squash when it scurries out when you unexpectedly open a closet or lift a bucket that's been sitting in the same place in the yard for too long. I'm sure they're harmless, they probably do good deeds which involve eating creatures uglier than themselves and they probably serve as useful links in the food chain somewhere, but instinct tells you to stomp. Or at least scream and recoil.

The presidential candidates...How in the world did the Greatest Nation in the World end up with these two totally unsuitable men running for the head position? Has anyone considered checking to see if Bruce Springsteen wants to really be the Boss?

Reality shows...In all fairness, I've never seen one. But from what I read on the covers of the magazines in the check-out line at the grocery store, I think they're geared toward my grandmother. She never believed man walked on the moon, and to the day she died she believed that if George Wallace had been elected president, they'd bring back the Ford plant. (The unions that had finagled 16 vacation weeks a year for long-term employees couldn't have had anything to do with it.) Do people really believe these people are living on these islands? They are on islands, aren't they?

Droopy pants...This is so ridiculous as to approach ludicrous. Right after stupid. At what point in time did some kid get up and think, "You know, I'll really attract the chicks if I'm walking around with my crotch around my knees, holding up my pants with one hand"? (This also set off another crisis when The Not Nice Kid announced out of the blue one day that she was "afraid of black people." Considering that her best friend at school is a black boy, we were stunned. Turns out? She's afraid of "ghetto" dressed people. She didn't know "black" referred to a skin color. THAT ONE is not my fault. I had it under control.)

So here I sit, abysmally ignorant, and firmly convinced that this is a good place to be. The Nice Kid is leaving private school and headed to public school this fall and the required reading for the summer is a story about a 12-year-old kid who has to sell cocaine to raise the money to get his brother out of jail. I have the complete works of Mark Twain sitting right next to the complete works of Charles Dickens and WTF?

Is anyone paying ATTENTION?