In honor of the fact that this is Monday and it’s a cruel, cruel world out there, and the only other things I have to write about are 1)how disgusted I am at being made to feel that I must jump on the Obamaniac train as a way of validating my self-worth (and this commentary, despite its flattering take on McCain, does a great job of pointing out how Obama’s self-aggrandization is as oxymoronic as that Dr. Pepper commercial that says “Be you; do what you do” and implies heavily that “be you” is code for “drink a mass-produced vehicle for high-fructose corn syrup”) and 2)how disgusted I am at the petty back-stabbing of the preschool parent community (see previous post; Frannie is still Avoiding My Gaze as though it’s battery acid), I’ve decided to take a break from parsing the evils of everyday life for a change and present you with the following email, received this weekend from my grandparents-in-law, ages 76 and 75. It was sent from her email account but clearly written by him; titled “What the ____ Book Won’t Tell You,” the book in question being a book of family bios we all collaborated on; and made me think that either a)those people have better drugs than I do or b)there is hope for the future of mankind:

Hi all,
If you read the ____ Book page 100 it explains how we met: So we went to see Charlie Chaplin in “Limelight.” She cried and I loaned her my handkerchief.
Afterwards I walked her home to her house. She invited me in and we sat on the sofa in her living room. We kissed for the first time and that was very nice, Now about 10,000 kisses later it is still very nice.
A friend suggested that we sign up for the $5 per month NetFlix plan so we did. The first movie we ordered was “Limelight.” Friday night we watched this 55-year-old movie and thoroughly enjoyed it, It has drama, dance, philosophy, comedy, and pathos. If you ever watch it, you have to figure out where in the movie I had to loan Peggy my handkerchief. Anyway, who knows, without this movie perhaps we would never have gotten together. I don’t know where that would put all of you?
Love to all the family, James

Isn’t that sweet? And don’t you wish you were a septuagenarian sniffling over “Limelight” rather than a Gen-Xer worrying about inevitable apocalypse (when you’re not employing your generation’s famous nihilism to court inevitable apocalypse)?

Hells yeah, is what I say. Happy Monday.