In case there was any question about my mental state

I just watched 17 minutes of the Miss USA pageant. I have to hope that my weekend road trip to Lawrence, Kansas for the Jayhawks parade will shake me out of my funk. Instead, however, I worry that my penchant for pageants and books of the Nancy Drew/Princess Diaries variety point to a severe mental/emotional collapse.

I was moved by this passage in my sociology text this week. "In traditional society, life was experienced holistically. People would see birth, sickness, and death as part of their normal lives. Children were conceived and grandparents died in the same home. Today, most of those experiences are put away from us and occur in bureaucratic settings where we don't see them as part of our normal and daily life...The world has thus become clean, tidy, and rational."

I like clean, tidy, and rational: irrationally so. I don't know how I feel about it in relation to this loss of connection.

Working on my next piece for McSweeney's - "Live-blogging my heart attack by brokestocker62"