OHM #5: Karmic Math

Dear Universe,

Um... really?

Kindly explain this equation:

Staying In School + Not Kicking Puppies + Wearing Underwear + Recycling =

Dead Transmission in 5-Year-Old Car One Week Before I'm Supposed to Visit My Family For Christmas

Is this your idea of a joke? I took a physics course and a religion course in college, so I can see this karmic math is clearly wrong. According to my calculations, the equation should work this way:

Staying In School + Not Kicking Puppies + Wearing Underwear + Recycling =

Functioning Transmission in 5-Year-Old Car + "Sweeney Todd" with My Family on Christmas Day

Or:

Staying in School + Recycling + Not Watching "A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila" =

Dinner with Ryan Gosling

See how that karmic math works? Universe, I'm beginning to suspect you don't understand math at all. I'm still smarting from this analytical gaffe on your part:

Finishing Anna Karenina + Not Marrying Kevin Federline=

Tonsilitis

Wrong again, Universe. See how you miscalculated there? Your calculations should have brought you here:

Finishing Anna Karenina + Not Marrying Kevin Federline=

New Shoes

That should have been an easy one. Please make sure you check your work in the future. I find these reckless calculations on your part tiresome--and expensive. My patience (and funds) are wearing thin, but I'm a relatively generous teacher. Perhaps you can do some practice equations like this one:

Dead Transmission + Holiday Blues Today = ?

a) Cancer of the Puppy

b) Free Drinks at the Bar

c) Regifted Fruitcake

d) Brand New Job (with Pay Raise!) in 2008

Choose carefully, Universe. I'll keep believing in you, but you've got to exercise your potential for good math.

I Mean, Really?

Sam

The Five People You Meet in an Afterlife Dive Bar

This past Sunday ABC aired "Oprah Winfrey Presents: Mitch Albom's For One More Day."

I did not watch it.

It's not that I don't appreciate Mitch Albom's efforts to make us realize the mortality of our loved ones. I just can't stand the saccharin sweetness of those efforts. If I were Mitch Albom, I'd write about the kind of people you probably wouldn't necessarily want to encounter in the afterlife--the people who are too difficult to go to heaven and too badass to compete with Satan in the Hellfire Olympics.

Peaches. I know she isn't dead. This would not stop her from crashing your dead man's party. Or your living room when you're watching Mitch Albom movies. At the afterlife dive bar, she would be the one enfleshed soul making you do body shots off of...

Gertrude Stein's stomach. Ever read Tender Buttons? Stein would be sure to berate you for not getting it while she downs another shot of vodka. No delicate flower, she. Gertrude Stein can hold her liquor and revolutionize literature at the same time.

Ike Turner, however, is not so stolid. You don't know what you said, but he has a broken beer bottle, and he's coming for you. Or, he just wants to play some blues. Take a chance.

John Kennedy Toole is there for you if you want to escape Ike's rage and/or blues. He'll make fun of you for ordering that girly drink, and then you two can talk about why there's no "Confederacy of Dunces" movie. I mean, really, what is that about?

And right before last call, have a beer with Ruth Gordon. She may even give you a ride home and tell you what it's like to be a person who's written scripts for Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn and hosted Saturday Night Live. Careful, though--she never got a driver's license when she was on this side of living.

Who's at your bar?