Bada-Dada-Boomerang

A few minutes ago, my ears heard the rumble of early Fourth of July fireworks a few miles away. Which got me reassessing, as any Laughorist would. Do I really enjoy fireworks?

Less than I thought, if I really examine my fireworks conscience. I've come to believe it's one of those things one is supposed to ooh and ahh over (one of those predictive happiness things explored by Daniel Gilbert). Granted, a few moments ago the neighboring Inner Harbor fireworks were merely an auditory apparition, not the visual array of chrysanthemums and umbrellas of neon-hued ashes punctuated by sonic bursts. I mean, fine, okay, I enjoy fireworks and all that, but I'm finding on closer inspection it's a predictive pattern. It's a social norm. I'm not convinced it's worth the traffic jam or mosquitoes or long day's journey into dark-enough dusk.

It's possible the fireworks I've encountered have been subpar, and that I must defer judgment until I experience Grucci-generated millennial, apocalyptic, transcendent fireworks in New York, London, Beijing, Berlin, or Boston. Maybe my fireworks encounters have been, shall we say, or-chasmic.

Which reminds me. Why do corny old movies depict orgasm via fireworks imagery, especially for females? (I may be wading into more-than-usual embarrassing waters here. For all I recall, that particular imagery was only employed in crummy 1970s porno flicks, or so, um, I've heard, not obscene.) Is that what the female-peak-sexual-nerve-ending-heart-stopping experience is like? Fireworks? Is it the sound? The visual configuration? The colors? The rocket's red glare? Somehow I doubt it (though I have no doubts that "their" experience is far more transporting than our male deal, except maybe for 1.4458 seconds).

I confess a vague, unpatriotic feeling, a hazy guilt about this fireworks, quasi-Freudian admission.

Maybe it's my age; perhaps it's my contrarian nature. It might even be that I've experienced more than enough spiritual, domestic, mental, or workplace fireworks, and don't need anymore.

Give me the verbal pyrotechnics of lustrous prose or poetry. Or sizzling correspondence. Or the belles lettres of fiery bloggers. Now, there's some fireworks.

(Be careful with those cherry bombs now, ya hear?)

Gone With The Windy Drafts

Disclaimer in Fine Print: Well, it's a good thing this blog has nothing to do with real life, and that it chronicles the misadventures of an impurely fictional persona, Pawlie Kokonuts. Yeah, what a relief that it's more factoid than fact. Sure.

Why is it that so-called experts (called subject matter experts, or SMEs, in some fields) think more is better? They wallow in bloviated, turgid, verbose prose. The wings of their condescension sail loftily on windy drafts of repetitive redundant redundancy. If you can say it, spray it (all over the page).

Of course, redactors (those of us in an editorial role) are mere "wordsmiths," respected for the polished veneer of their diction, certainly not valued for their substantive contributions. We prettify; SMEs solve ponderous problems with tumefacient efficiency.

Call it a rough day in the mines.

We all have them.

Oh well. I don't care if the final product ends up in Swahili; I get paid the same.

Mapenzi salama

Kondomu

Kama unahisi uko tayari kufanya mapenzi, au tayari unashiriki katika ngono, ni vyema kuchukua tahadhari. Hakikisha katika harakati zako za kufanya mapenzi, unajali afya yako kwa kufanya ngono iliyo salama. Inaweza kuwa vigumu, na jambo unalolionea haya kujadiliana na mapenzi wako, swala la uwezekano wa kuambukizwa magonjwa ya zinaa, na kutumia njia za kuzuia mimba.

Asante*


* thank you

Or-chasm

or - chasm - n. The immeasurable distance between one choice and another.

Or, with its grammar of gestation. Or, with its suggestive reservoir of participles of posing; its gerunds of guessing; its infinitives of "to do this" or "to do that." Or, the signature nomenclature of choice and mystery.

But is it possible for the divide between "either" and "or" to be exciting? I don't know. Anxiety-producing, yes, but exciting? Anyway, ask Soren Kierkegaard, author of "Either/Or." (Kierkegaard didn't seem to be that big on pleasure, though, did he?)


For or-chasm, picture Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken," a paean to the possibilities of choice.


Or William Carlos Williams's "The Red Wheelbarrow," with its potently resonating phrase "so much depends." (Of course, when pondering either or-chasms so much depends on lots and lots of things, eh?)

Play nice now. You're on your own.
Copyright © 2007 The Laughorist and Pawlie Kokonuts

Anti-Semantic Banking

As part of a new ad campaign, HSBC Bank barks forth with this online copy:

A headline of:

there's no small change

Followed by:

Choose a more impactful way to bank.

It's all part of the green, eco-friendly bandwagon, which is fine, which I salute. The HSBC site says they were the first major bank, in 2005, to be recognized for being "completely carbon neutral." Fine. Excellent. Even without a hyphen between carbon and neutral. Alleluia. I get it. I'm green with usury.

But let's ponder impactful.

Yes, it is found in dictionaries; yes, our dynamic, living language gives birth to new words every day. I don't subscribe to the pedantic or superior view that yesterday's solecisms can't become today's standard form. You might say it's sort of like clothing fashion and style.

Impactful, how do I hate thee? Let me count the ways.

Well, for one, I believe it all stems from "impact" as verb, arising from environmental impact statements in the U.S., starting in the 1970s. With that usage, "affect" flew out the window like some threatened or endangered bird.

Impactful carries with it all the weight of seriousness it doesn't deserve.

It abdicates responsibility; it lets the writer or speaker avoid taking sides as to whether we're talking good impacts or bad.

I loathe it.

You can bank on it.

p.s. At least the spellchecker hates it, too, for once (for nonce).

Moth-eatin' Potential

So I'm in the anteroom of the pool, with a floor whose cerulean hue merely mimics the paler teal of the pool water, out beyond the doorway (unseen, but remembered). Swimming pools, those tiny mock diadems of suburbia that wink at you as you jet across America, as you subconsciously, or fervently, pray that a clear blue sky won't be an omen reminiscent of an apocalyptic September Tuesday morning. It is not the free urban pool up the hill from our house, the one with an occasional police presence, if only as a deterrent. It is up the road a piece. Yes, the suburbs. And, here, the deterrent is green, as in moola: three dollars for adults, two dollars for each kid. Cash as winnowing factor. The girls go left; I go right. They take a preswim shower; I do not, because I do not intend to swim. I just want to sit in the lounge chair (an amenity not provided, for lamentably obvious reasons, at the pool closer to home) and leisurely read The New York Times, the Sunday Times, on Father's Day. A guilty pleasure, guilt-free. But first Nature calls, perhaps triggered by the thought of water, perhaps by the echoic splashing of water only yards away, though still unseen, but surely smelt chlorinatedly. To answer Nature's call, being a man, I stand at a urinal. You would too, in my, um, position (HAHAHAhahaha). In mid-sentence, so to speak, I am slightly startled by a fluttering. No, it is not the arresting flutter of an old man's heart. Instead, I am startled by the wings of a moth, in the urinal. A beautiful brownish moth caught in the albino porcelain of wastewater preliminary pretreatment. I would have to report this as a personal first. I was a little concerned my winged creature would zero in on my exposed vulnerability.* So, I interrupted my paltry riverine contribution midstream, and switched to an adjacent urinal. Duty done, safely free of aerial attack, I chuckled to myself, squinted my eyes, spied the pool, and proceeded poolside, wondering what metaphor of moth-eaten and rusted desire had winged its way to my soul.

(For the record, the moth was nowhere to be seen on a return visit to the lavatory. Make what you wish of any of this.)

Laugh. Or . . .
Else.

* This is where Tony Soprano would interrupt and say, "Whaddaya tryin' to tell me? A moth tried to bite your pecker?"

Anniversary This

Speaking of anniversaries, 35 years ago today Richard Nixon's buddies broke into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate Hotel complex in Washington, D.C., to help them get political intelligence, to win an election that was a shoo-in anyway, and was ultimately a landslide. I distinctly remember a radio news report about it, perhaps even a day later. A totally unremarkable story, "a third-rate burglary," that was perhaps the closing item on the hour's news.

And so the lying and the cover-up did in the presidency of Nixon, just before a looming impeachment trial.

Will anyone believe that some 14 or 15 years later a sitting president was not impeached for circumventing the will of Congress to subsidize illegal guerrillas in Nicaragua?

Furthermore, will anyone believe, 50 years from now, that a succeeding sitting president was impeached (and acquitted) essentially for lying about his private sex life?

To say nothing of a current president carrying on a misdirected war on basic civil liberties in the name of freedom?

Bloomsday Blogsday 1, and Counting

Today is my first blogiversary. Or is that blogaversary? Maybe it's even a bit of blogslavery, shackled by semantics and the art and craft (and obsession) of saying (saying anything, anything at all, in almost any manner). (Incidentally and fittingly, June 16, is also Bloomsday, the day in 1904 when the fictional events in James Joyce's Ulysses take place, in Dublin.)

It started on a Thursday night and into Friday morning, wandering around the steamy back alleys of the World Wide Web (without the editor's choice of "Worldwide," which would have forever branded us with WW), teasing out the scene not far from Seattle, tempting my tendency toward the tawdry, when I should've been sleeping.

And so, the nom de plume Pawlie Kokonuts was hatched, with hats off to Paulie Walnuts.

The title of The Laughorist was a natural, since I had already started a store revolving around the concept of so-called laughorisms. And my first post, on solipsism, was indicative of a suspicion I harbored, and harvest, for this talking tour.

Looking back, I notice I received no Comments for a week; not until my 11th post (did I care? was I more pure then? less self-conscious?). The first Comment was from the blogger at Kierkegaard Lives. Thank you. (I see, he's still posting; we share similar layouts.) Most likely, I stopped at his blog and teased him into stopping by at my place, with a word or two on Soren Kierkegaard thrown in.

I confess I've not been the perfect blog community member or neighbor. By that, I mean I don't reciprocate Comments faithfully or even read other blogs consistently. And that is because it's hard enough for me just to keep this going, being of meager discipline and possessing little perseverance. Don't take it personally, or impersonally.

Thanks for stopping by. Then and now. I've met all those people you see linked n this page, as well as many others, and more who need to be linked. Or will be. Deo volente.

It's been a journey of linking, connecting, conversing, and cavorting. I've gotten more from all of you than I've put into it. Thank you.


Spotlight on Year 1

One Slice, With Legs

Testing Testosterone

Water You Know

We the People, We the Ephemerists

(which evoked the most Comments).

One easy discovery was, I can't be funny all the time, nor do I want to be (witness several posts on the deaths of loved ones, or on la petite mort, or on the death of deception or illusion).

And who would've guessed that I would get the most hits, so far, owing to my post on the serial comma, with chitchat coming from Vanity Fair and The New Yorker?

Again, thanks to all of you -- first-timers, late-comers, new-comers, toll-takers, big-talkers, and silent-partners (even if all those hyphens aren't truly needed).

Carry on.

Excelsior.

Age quod agis.

The Munchin' Chronicles

What do you for lunch? More precisely, what do you do during lunchtime? This came up as an article of conversation about lunchtime conversation, before lunch. One guy in the office I was visiting said, "You could be like married people and just stare at each other." He was referring to the lunch I was about to have with a new employee. She's recently back to the U.S. after being in Europe for many years. I said I prefer grabbing a newspaper and eating by myself. That's what I typically do. Outdoors. Or in a conference room (it most assuredly cannot be at my desk; if I owned the company I'd forbid that; it is wretchedly unhealthy). Or at the mall. I used to do that nearly every day at our old location, since it was down the street from the new-fashioned public square. Sometimes I do errands. The library. The post office. Sometimes I meet with a group of friends. I like to be in a place where I can watch people (way better in the summer; fewer articles of clothing; more flesh). Oh. And I usually eat a lunch I make in the morning; sometimes I buy lunch downtown, or elsewhere. (Speaking of eating, Neal Conan on NPR's Talk of the Nation today actually said this to Strawberry Saroyan concerning unusual names, "Nice to eat you." Or maybe it was, "People must always be saying it was nice eating you." Gulp. She awkwardly paused, on the other end of the line, and said she didn't know how to respond to that. He seemed totally oblivious to the implications of his, um, muchable query.)

Sometimes I conduct business at lunchtime. Today was quasi-business. How does one conduct business at lunchtime? The point is, I'm gregarious, engaging, witty, talkative, inquiring. All that. Feign interest, at all costs.

But little do they all know the toll it takes on me. It takes its toll. The cost of living adjustment (COLA), call it.

I like lunchtime solitude.

Yesterday, however, I truly enjoyed happening upon Eric, on his birthday, 64, with his assistant. Dining outside. Relaxed. Unhurried. They invited me to sit down. Turns out Rebecca doesn't own a car, at all, takes the bus or other forms of transportation. She's around 33 or so. She topped me. I thought I was hot shit for taking the bus twice a week. Good for her. It can be done.

Maybe I should ditch my piece-of-crap car. The steering wheel ain't steering well. It shimmies. A shimmering sign?

So today's lunch was conversational and tasty (Vietnamese-Thai) and airy and thoughtful. But it takes energy.

What do you do at lunchtime?

Chasing Climaxes

From the narrow vantage point of one solipsist (i.e., The Laughorist), the closing scene of "The Sopranos" final episode demonstrated both brilliance and courage on the part of David Chase. The scene takes place at a New Jersey diner called Holsten's (having lived in Jersey for 10 years, with two children born in the Garden State, I must confess to harboring very fond memories of those joints). The hypertense tableau is set, with all of the Soprano family poised to sit down and eat, all in one place and at the same time. This is itself a rare event for any family (nuclear or otherwise) in America, as ably demonstrated by Steven Spielberg in the opening scene of "E.T." You might say, the Sopranos are in a Tension Envelope (as I have blogged several times before). In the words of the summary provided by HBO:

Tony is the first to arrive at Holsten's for a family dinner. He sits in a booth and plays a song on the jukebox, watching the door. Carmela enters and joins him, asking about his meeting with Mink. He tells her Carlo's gonna testify and she takes the news with a sigh. AJ arrives next, complaining about the more mundane tasks of his job but quotes old advice from his father: "Try to remember the times that were good." Meanwhile, Meadow struggles to parallel park outside. Customers come and go - a shady looking guy who's been sitting at the counter enters the restroom. Finally parking the car, Meadow runs inside to join her family, just in time for dinner.

But of course the summary cannot convey the electric fear pulsing through this ordinary moment. As viewers, we expect the whole family to be sprayed with bullets, or at least Tony, or for him to be arrested. Something. We crave some spectacular climax. The bell at the door rings; SCREEN GOES TO BLACK. (The bell at the door, reminiscent of Thomas DeQuincey's essay on the knocking at the gate in Macbeth.)

Many, if not most, fans and ordinary viewers feel cheated by this anti-climax, this impotent lack of climax, this "nothing" nonending. But this David-Chased climax of the quotidian, this climax of the ordinary, is perfect because it's like a Chekhov slice of life. This is it. That's it. Just see it, folks, with all its laden possibilities.

Did I lust for and expect the Big Bang Bada Bing Climax? Sure. But here's why I like what Chase did:

1. The cut to BLACK was so abrupt it was like experiencing the shock of a hit (if indeed they were assassinated; maybe they weren't).

2. It was like death itself (I know; I can only surmise) in that it was the rudest of interruptions. You want to say, "Hey! Wait! I'm not finished here. Something's wrong with my freakin' TV. Hold it. something's wrong. I'm not ready for this." Which is more or less what we want to yell at Death anyway, eh?

3. I'm not likely the first to observe this, but wasn't David Chase obviously echoing T.S. Eliot's The Hollow Men (1925) with:

"This is the way the world ends / This is the way the world ends / This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper."

4. C'mon! Aren't most climaxes more ordinary than extraordinary if you're really honest? (I freely expect a veritable chorus of satiated and panting readers to shout: "Speak for yourself, buddy!")

5. Isn't life really not as tidily wrapped and explicitly resolved as we have come to expect through supermarket novels and conventional (American) dramas, at least as depicted in television series and movies?

Plus, isn't life

Memories Are Made of This

I know, I know, you were expecting my regular-octane juvenile humor: "Mammaries are made of this HAHAhahaha."

As for dissecting memories, it's been a recurring theme, not dream, of The Laughorist blog (soon to celebrate its first blogiversary). As surely Marcel Proust illustrated lushly to the extreme, our memories are tricky, subjective, and flirtatious; we rarely know what doors they will open. And we don't know if we dare believe what we see, hear, taste, smell, or feel when we walk through those memory doors. That was part of the thesis of Stumbling on Happiness: the human propensity to color, or discolor, past (or future) events.

I just read an interesting take on this sort of thing by Alec Wilkinson, in The New Yorker issue of May 28, 2007 (do we really not write "19" anymore? does anyone remember writing 19XX [well, not really the X's] on checks, essays, reports, summonses, divorce decrees, baptismal certificates, marriage licenses, postcards, and letters of resignation? I do).

The article is about one Gordon Bell, who is lifelogging. He is creating a personal archive, a database of everything he can scan into a computer about his current and past life. MyLifeBits is what the project's called. He now works for Microsoft and wears a special camera as part of this all-consuming venture and experiment (experiventure, call it).

We bloggers think we're obsessive?

Think again.

It's all rather intriguing. Bell, 72, one of the founders of the Internet who has been called the Frank Lloyd Wright of computers, and Microsoft want to see how computers act when they establish a responsive relationship with our memories, or what we digitally tell a computer is our memories. Thus, a computer could easily say, "Watch out, Pawlie, you are entering the trough you typically enter after 17.268954 days. And it will last 3.000012223 days."

Or so I gather.

There's all sorts of potential ramifications to this sort of thing, some wonderful, some frightful. Microsoft's Jim Gemmell says in the article, "People argue about the need to forget things, but if you look at business discipline -- advising that you write everything down, your goals and objectives, and return to them to see how you did, examining what went wrong -- I think the same thing could happen with our personal lives. Being able to say, 'Now I realize my tone of voice was threatening' -- I think there's a real positive aspect in having the real record of what things looked and sounded like, and sequences of events, because we often end up believing things that are not based on facts anymore."

Really, Jim? Great. That's all I need. Computer as Grand Inquisitor. Computer as Torquemada.

Leave it to a software engineer to quantify memory.

Imagine this after-the-so-called fact bedroom debriefing: a blow-by-blow analysis on the fruitfulness (or dearth of ripe yield) in the garden of earthly pleasures, id est, orgasm or its lack. Let's cal this the Sixth Circle of Hell. And the Seventh Circle of Hell would go beyond anyone's worst nightmare of "he said, she said." It would be a recording with painful precision not only of the words but also the feelings and motives of the players.

We don't even what to imagine applying this beyond the home to the workplace or the public arena.

O spare us, HAL 9000.

This digitalization of memory gives new meaning to that line by James Joyce, "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."

Maybe it's me. Maybe I'd rather take refuge in the facts as I remember them, filtered by my psyche, not HAL's.

(Wouldn't you?)

(Say, what would Steve Jobs and Apple say to all this?)

Is it all agonizingly Orwellian? Or enticingly Proustian?

Wilkinson, a fine writer (I once read an essay he wrote about the legendary New Yorker editor William Maxwell, whom I met, briefly, in the 1980s, wherein Maxwell told the young Wilkinson to send a manuscript by means of letters to Maxwell; brilliant), writes: "Memory revises itself endlessly. We remember a vivid person, a remark, a sight that was unexpected, an occasion on which we felt something profoundly. The rest falls away. We become more exalted in our memories than we actually were, or less so. The interior stories we tell about ourselves rarely agree with the truth."

Whatever that is.

May you remember This.

Soprano Apocalypto

More seriously, I offer these two alternative predictions regarding "The Sopranos" finale:

1. Apocalypto in Toto:

Remember those Middle Eastern guys who were hanging around the 'Bing? The ones who have gone missing? They're ba-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-ck, with a vengeance. They unleash some catastrophic attack that wipes out everyone, and we mean Everyone.

or

2. Apocalyptas Paterfamilias:

A.J. takes out his family and himself.

You saw it here first. If any other blogger says the same thing, may you gag on gabagool.

Mobular Prognostications

Last year I discovered we have HBO on a TV upstairs, although we never asked for it (it must've fallen off a truck), so I became a latecomer fan of "The Sopranos." I thought I wouldn't be able to follow it, given all the twists and turns of the previous seven or so years. But, hey, I enjoy it, right from the theme song. (Well, one or two shows this season were total bombs.) It's a great tragicomic epic soap opera with broads and bullets. (Best hilarious line last week: "It doesn't take a gynecologist to know which way the wind's blowing.") It's weird. Just when you begin to sympathize with Tony Soprano, he whacks someone or knocks eight teeth out of someone's skull (with a bit of tooth shrapnel in his pants cuff found when he's at his therapist's).

I'm gonna miss it. Sunday is the finale.

So,

here are

Top Ten Predictions for 'The Sopranos' Finale

10. A.J. becomes the 11th Democrat to run for President (of the U.S.).

9. Meadow gives up pre-law to run The Bada-Bing.

8. Sil recovers from his wounds and opens a hair salon.

7. Vito's son starts a goth band.

6. Carmela has a sex change, readying her for a starring role in the spin-off "The Altos."

5. Christopher's widow produces "Cleaver 2."

4. Dr. Melfi tries to shoot Carmella but misses.

3. The shrink Elliot whacks Dr. Melfi.

2. Tony Soprano enters the federal Witness Protection Program and assumes the name George W. Bush.

and

1. Paulie Walnuts enters the federal Witness Protection Program as Pawlie Kokonuts.

Tilting at Titles

I tend toward minimalism. (Make that: I tnd twrd mnmlsm.) I really love titles, such as the book cited in yesterday's post, Stumbling on Happiness. As a writer, I often start with that. At work, for example, in crafting a proposal, I like to forge a consensus around a slogan or catchphrase, something simple enough to remember, something distinctive; iconic.

Trouble is, the flame burns out quickly. I could never be a novelist. I can barely complete a short story. I love haiku. I have neither the patience nor fervor for the long trek. (Attention all armchair psychoanalytical "specialists": yes, these are classic symptoms of some sort of sexual dysfunction, I'm sure, as well as attention deficit disorder, or attention surplus reorder. Fine. All well and good. And feck off.)

Jorge Luis Borges (and Stanislaw Lem, I recall) was known to create book reviews of nonexistent books. I recall Borges once declaring something like, "I could've written the whole book, but why bother?" (I'm sure he said it in Spanish, and I've lost lots through mistranslation -- and misremembering.)

Let's go a step further. Why bother writing the review or the book? Why not just the title?

Alas, I am an imaginary slacker of the highest order, and shortest duration. I love titles (not Mr. or Mrs. or Ms., though I did like that recent faintly erotic "sir" appellation left by Wanderlust Scarlett).

I just typed the words

So, here follows "A Titular Trickling"

and began a nascent parade of would-be clever titles.

None were (was?) clever. None even remotely amusing or evocative.

It figures.

(For those lapping their tongues for blog titles, you are urged to review my richly mined archive, arcing with buzzing intensity at the hive of creativity. Wot?)

The Saga of the Especially Special Specialist

I once had a job (sounds like a mundane start to "Norwegian Wood") whose title was Project Specialist. They made up the title because they needed to call me something, and they didn't exactly have anyone who was just a technical writer. That wouldn't sound, um, technical enough. How special I felt that first day, back in February 1999. After all, I was now a specialist, and not just any kind of specialist but a project specialist. Being a specialist distinguished me from the hoi polloi of all those plebeian generalists out there, or within the firm.

Turns out, the House of Specialists is bursting at the seams with residents. In fact, we all have a room there. I'm just down the hall from you, and you. Especially special you.

This weekend, I just finished a book I had blogged about even before I read it: Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert.

I can report it is entertaining and informative. It may even change the way I think (which may or may not make me happy, but that is only part of the story). At one point Gilbert writes:

Because if you are like most people, then like most people, you don't know you're like most people. Science has given us a lot of facts about the average person, and one of the most reliable of these facts is that the average person doesn't see herself as average. Most students see themselves as more intelligent than the average student, most business managers see themselves as more competent than the average business manager, and most football players see themselves as having better 'football sense' than their teammates. Ninety percent of motorists consider themselves to be safer-than-average drivers, and 94 percent of college professors consider themselves to be better-than-average teachers. [p.252]

He goes on.

I suppose he could just as easily have written, "Every blogger considers himself or herself especially special, with insights more worth sharing than anyone else and insights more worthy of comments than anyone else."

Or else, why do we all bother tapping the keyboard keys, hunh?

I'm not sure this stumbling onto specialness diluted by everyone else's special specialness makes me happy or not.

I think not.

Maybe it's a topic for me and my therapist on Wednesday.

Then again, I'm a little fearful my therapist may pull a Dr. Melfi on me, just as she did on Tony Soprano. My therapist might feel that I'm using therapy simply to validate my pathological special specialness that goes by the especially special name of solipsism.