Ten Great Mysteries

1. How a precision instrument such as a penis can shoot pee so wide of the toilet bowl target.

2. Why everyone in the world is so obsessed with getting nowhere faster than any one else.

3. How it is that George Bush has not yet been assassinated. (Note to FBI: I'm not suggesting that anyone do this, only that it's a great mystery to me that no one has.)

4. How the urge to procreate is stronger than the pain and carnage a woman experiences giving birth.

5. How it is that boredom became the new Zen. In my experience, you have to be pretty determined to be bored in a world where there is so much to do. For me to reach a state of boredom I would have to go to a boredom clinic and find myself an ennui master to guide me. Yet so many people achieve this state effortlessly.

6. Why it is that so many women seem to believe it's more honorable to be a mother than to be a wife. Seems to me that most women are subservient to their children in ways they would never be subservient to a man. Considering that half the children out there that women "serve" are boys, isn't mothering also contributing to the "evil" patriarchal system? How is it more honorable to scrub the floors in service of your three year old napoleon than to scrub them for yourself and your spouse?

7. How people can live in a flood zone for twenty years and make a great show of being surprised every single year when they have to evacuate their homes because of flooding. Guess what people? It's going to flood next year too, so either stop pretending to be surprised or move out of the flood zone for cryin' out loud.

8. How a person can be a size zero. Zero can't be a size because it means "nothing". You can't be no size. And why do women feel proud to achieve a zero existence?

9. How women actually believe they look younger with plastic surgery. All it does is make them look like mutant older women who wish they were younger. (It makes me really sad.)

10. The amazing disappearance of critical thinking in my country. When did we stop teaching it? Did all the critical thinking skills get sucked up into a big black hole and land on some other planet? Or is there a new disease out there like tuberculosis that renders people incapable of thinking critically? If so, why aren't we inoculating our children against such a life crippling illness?

*Reading this list through I notice that I appear to be more mystified by women than by men. For the record: this list merely reflects what I find most mystifying today, by tomorrow men could easily figure more prominently on a similar list.