I know you've been concerned about my inability to answer the world's most benign question ("How are you?"), so you'll be relieved to know that I've gotten over it. It wasn't the incredible depth of my self-examination that brought me to enlightenment but the fact that three weeks of holidays/school vacation/no alone time, ever, were finally over. For a time, it was all I could do to arrange my face in into something resembling human civility.  But now that order has been restored (my child is back in school! I had a week off of work! I doubled my morning coffee consumption!) my little human-relations problem seems to have resolved itself. I didn't manage to Popcorn Whisper this week, but I did post a thing over at The Stir where I use celebrities and E. B. White to explain Chinese astrology.

Even with only 12 signs, Chinese astrology runs on a 60-year cycle. Elements come into play (earth, fire, water, wood, and metal), as well as our old friends yin (female) and yang (male). So as we leave 2011, the year of the yin metal rabbit, 2012 will be the year of the yang water dragon, 2013 will be the year of the yin water snake, and so on forever until you don't need to care anymore because you'll be dead.

All right, I have to go, Coneheads is on.