Potatoes and Planes: Don't kill the messenger.

Apparently it's both Vegetarian Awareness Month and Breast Cancer Awareness month, two causes I can (and do, regularly) get behind. To celebrate, I plan to feel myself up in a bathtub full of mashed potatoes.

That was the most nonsensical thing I've ever written. A total lie, just for the sake of lying. But actually, that sounds nice. The bathtub full of mashed potatoes part, I mean. Not the feeling up.

Probably good for the skin, too, as MP's contain milk, if they're made right, and milk is very moisturizing, I hear.

But in truth, a potato is really a root, isn't it? Or a tuber? Definitely a starch. So a potato may not, in fact, be a vegetable at all, rendering this whole bit even more pointless than I ever imagined. Fuck it, then. I'll just do a regular self-feel, sans veggies. A tub full of peas just isn't that appealing.

Don't say I never touch on critical news and health issues. Because I do. Sometimes.

Sorta.

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Breaking news: NY Pitcher Flies Plane Into Building.
While all of NY city is busy flipping the fuck out over how in the world, post 9/11, a plane of any size could possibly fly into a building almost entirely un-noticed until after the plumes of black smoke and screaming people began pouring out of buildings, let me just make one other note:

In the New York Times, the late Lidle was quoted saying "The whole plane has a parachute on it,'' Lidle said. ``Ninety-nine percent of pilots that go up never have engine failure, and the 1 percent that do usually land it. But if you're up in the air and something goes wrong, you pull that parachute, and the whole plane goes down slowly."

In the Philadelphia Inquirer this summer, he boasted "The flying? I'm not worried about it. I'm safe up there. I feel very comfortable with my abilities flying an airplane."

Yikes. If there's one thing that's always made me a little nervous, it's needles. If there are four things that have always made me nervous, they're needles, the giant squid, somebody cutting my achilles tendon from under my bed when I get up for water in the middle of the night, and flying.

Call me supersitious, but you'll never catch me saying I feel perfectly comfortable with sitting surrounded by thousands and thousands of pounds of metal while it whizzes through the sky on thin air like magic. No sirree. I'm sure there's a perfectly logical explanation for why flying's a piece of cake (likely involving physics, aerodynamics and something called "drag", but not in context with the word "queen", rendering it totally uninteresting to me). Yes, there's a scientific reason flying is safe, but I don't care. It's strange, and unnerving, and amazing. I have a healthy respect for flying, and I'm just crazy enough to believe it's that twinge of anxiety that will keep me alive.

Just as the twinge of guilt when I eat a pound of chocolate covered gummi bears will (hopefully) keep me from obesity, and a hideous hangover will keep me from, in the future, drinking entire bottles of wine back to back at sushi and sake bars while repeatedly yelling "THIS ISN'T SAKE, THIS IS SUCKY!!!".

Okay, that one's a stretch. But you get what I'm saying.