The other day I started my morning by looking through the newspaper which was not a good way to start my day. I read where Michael Mukasey, Bush’s nominee for attorney general, told the Senate Judiciary Committee he didn’t know whether the simulated drowning (waterboarding) of prisoners is torture or illegal. If he is appointed, I guess we’ll be getting another idiot to work with the other idiots surrounding the supreme idiot – George Bush.

Then I read where hundreds of troops, home from the war, have left the military and committed suicide. Many are suffering from combat stress and not getting enough help when they return. And yet we keep sending our young men and women over to fight in a war that should never have happened in the first place. These are young men and women who wanted nothing more than to come home and start their lives, doing something they wanted. But it’s all over for a lot of them. What an awful mess we have created worldwide.

So then I noticed a headline that read, “No clue, but a stroke just waiting to happen.” It went on to say that one in 60 older people could be walking around with benign brain tumors and don’t even know it. This information came from a Dutch study on brain abnormalities. Thank God for the Dutch – they gave us something else to worry about.

And then an article caught my attention on daylight savings time that states the manipulation of light and dark is triggering health dangers. It gave much info on wakefulness hormones, melatonin, depression, SAD, and on and on. But what it all came down to was the fact that women who do shift work – working at night – have higher rates of breast cancer. I worked at night for a while and I had breast cancer, so there you go.

I was thoroughly depressed after my morning paper, so I decided to do some manual labor and take down my tomato plant, Audrey III. She was getting yellow and not looking at all well. I saved the six remaining tomatoes and will have them tonight. It was hard work getting rid of everything and made me very sad, not SAD. Now I sit here and she’s not beside me. I really enjoyed her and wish she could have lived through the winter, but that was not to be.

After taking down Audrey. I was more depressed and wondered what I could do to cheer myself up. And then I thought of the only thing that makes me laugh and forget the stupid events of the day . . . watching “SEINFELD!” So I poured myself a glass of wine and settled down to two episodes. I have seen every episode many, many times and can practically recite the dialogue, but it never fails to make me laugh. Sometimes I think maybe I should throw things at the TV while it’s on like they do at “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” But I’m here alone, so it wouldn’t be as effective. And dancing wouldn’t be that good all by myself. I don’t know what it is about that show – the characters are all neurotic and narcissistic and seem to live in their own little cocoon with no worries whatsoever. Jerry works occasionally, George works sporadically, Elaine works part of the time and Kramer never works. But they don’t worry about health insurance, property taxes, gas prices, wars, politics or issues that take up our lives. They just go on their way, meeting at the coffee shop to discuss issues such as how can George get out of marrying Susan (she died after licking their poisonous wedding invitations – he lucked out on that), will Jerry ever find the right girl (he missed out on the virgin who turned against him), will Elaine ever get the perfect boyfriend who will please her sexually, and will Kramer ever do anything at all besides act goofy. So after watching that and finishing my wine, I felt considerably better than I did the rest of the day. All I can say is, thank God for “Seinfeld.”

The above picture is of me feeling sad as a little girl. That’s the way I felt after reading the newspaper and taking down Audrey. But I’m ok now.