A little boy was overheard talking to himself as he strode through his backyard, baseball cap in place and toting a ball and bat. "I'm the greatest baseball player in the world," he said proudly. Then he tossed the ball in the air, swung and missed.

Undaunted, he picked up the ball, threw it into the air and said to himself, "I'm the greatest baseball player ever!" He swung at the ball again, and again he missed.

He paused a moment to examine the bat and ball carefully. Then once more, he threw the ball into the air and said, "I'm the greatest baseball player who ever lived," swung the bat hard and again missed the ball.

"Wow!" he exclaimed. "What a pitcher!"

How to deal with a jerk:

Now get this. I was sitting at my desk, when I remembered a phone call I had to make. I found the number and dialed it. A man answered nicely saying, "Hello?"

I politely said, "This is Patrick Hanifin and could I please speak to Robin Carter?" Suddenly the phone was slammed down on me! I couldn't believe that anyone could be that rude.

I tracked down Robin's correct number and called her. She had transposed the last two digits.

After I hung up with Robin, I spotted the wrong number still lying there on my desk. I decided to call it again. When the same person once more answered, I yelled "You're a jerk!" and hung up.

Next to his phone number I wrote the word "Jerk," and put it in my desk drawer. Every couple of weeks, when I was paying bills, or had a really bad day, I'd call him up. He'd answer, and then I'd yell, 'You're a jerk!" It would always cheer me up.

Later in the year the phone company introduced caller ID. This was a real disappointment for me, I would have to stop calling the jerk. Then one day I had an idea. I dialed his number, then heard his voice,

"Hello."

I made up a name. "Hi. This is Herman with the telephone company and I'm just calling to see if you're familiar with our caller ID program?"

He went, "No!" and slammed the phone down. I quickly called him back and said, "That's because you're a jerk!"

And the reason I took the time to tell you this story, is to show you how if there's ever anything really bothering you, you can do something about it. Just dial 722-4822.

The old lady at the mall really took her time pulling out of the parking space. I didn't think she was ever going to leave. Finally her car began to move and she started to very slowly back out of the stall. I backed up a little more to give her plenty of room to pull out. Great, I thought, she's finally leaving.

All of a sudden this black camaro come flying up the parking isle in the wrong direction and pulls into her space. I started honking my horn and yelling, "You can't just do that, Buddy. I was here first!" The guy climbed out of his camaro completely ignoring me. He walked toward the mall as if he didn't even hear me.

I thought to myself, this guy's a jerk, there's sure a lot of jerks in this world. I noticed he had a For Sale sign in the back window of his car. I wrote down the number. Then I hunted for another place to park. A couple of days later, I'm at home sitting at my desk. I had just gotten off the phone after calling 722-4822 and yelling, "You're a jerk!" (It's really easy to call him now since I have his number on speed dial). I noticed the phone number of the guy with the black camaro lying on my desk and thought I'd better call this guy, too.

After a couple rings someone answered the phone and said, "Hello." I said, "Is this the man with the black camaro for sale?" "Yes it is." "Can you tell me where I can see it?" "Yes, I live at 1802 West 34th street. It's a yellow house and the car's parked right out front. I said, "What's your name?" "My name is Don Hansen." "When's a good time to catch you, Don?"

"I'm home in the evenings." "Listen Don, can I tell you something?"

"Yes."

"Don, you're a jerk!" And I slammed the phone down. After I hung up I added Don Hansen's number to my speed dialer.

For a while things seemed to be going better for me. Now when I had a problem I had two jerks to call. Then after several months of calling the jerks and hanging up on them, the whole thing started to seem like an obligation. It just wasn't as enjoyable as it used to be.

I gave the problem some serious thought and came up with a solution.

First, I had my phone dial Jerk #1. A man answered nicely saying, "Hello." I yelled "You're a jerk!" But I didn't hang up.

The jerk said, "Are you still there?"

I said, "Yeah.."

He said, "Stop calling me."

I said, "No."

He said, "What's your name, Pal?"

I said, "Don Hansen."

"Where do you live?"

"1802 West 34th Street. It's a yellow house and my black camaro's parked out front."

"I'm coming over right now, Don. You'd better start saying your prayers."

"Yeah, like I'm really scared, Jerk!" and I hung up.

Then I called Jerk #2.

He answered, "Hello."

I said, "Hello, Jerk!"

He said, "If I ever find out who you are..."

"You'll what?"

"I'll kick your butt."

Well, here's your chance. I'm coming over right now Jerk!" And I hung up.

Then I picked up the phone and called the police. I told them a big gang fight was going down at 1802 West 34th Street. After that I climbed into my car and headed over to 34th Street to watch the whole thing.

I turned onto 34th Street and parked my car under the shade of a tree half a block from Jerk #2's house. There were two guys fighting out front. Suddenly there were about 12 police cars and a helicopter. The police wrestled the two men to the ground and took them away.

A couple of months go by and I get a call for jury duty. I was picked to be on a trial of two guys charged with disorderly conduct. As luck would have it, it happened to be the same two guys. I might have influenced the jury, because when they announced the verdict, they said, "We the jury find the defendants to be guilty, and a couple of jerks!"

Two guys were taking Chemistry at the University of Alabama. They were doing well in the class and thought that going into the final they had a solid "A". They were so confident that the weekend before finals week, they went to the University of Tennessee to party with some friends. They had a great time. However, with hangovers and everything, they overslept all day Sunday and didn't make it back to Alabama until early Monday morning, the day of the exam.

Rather than taking the final then, they found their professor after the final to explain to him why they missed the final. They told him that they went up to the University of Tennessee for the weekend, and had planned to come back in time to study, but that they had a flat tire on the way back, and didn't have a spare, and couldn't get help for a long time, so they were late in getting back to campus. The professor told them they could make up the final on the following day. They were elated and relieved.

At the final, the professor placed them in separate rooms, handed each of them a test booklet and told them to begin. The first problem, worth 5 Points, was something simple about Molarity & Solutions. "Cool," they thought. "This is going to be easy."

The next problem was worth 95 Points. It said: - Which tire ??

Let's say a guy named Roger is attracted to a woman named Elaine. He asks her out to a movie; she accepts; they have a pretty good time. A few nights later he asks her out to dinner, and again they enjoy themselves.

They continue to see each other regularly, and after a while neither one of them is seeing anybody else.

And then, one evening when they're driving home, a thought occurs to Elaine, and, without really thinking, she says it aloud: "Do you realize that, as of tonight, we've been seeing each other for exactly six months?"

And then there is silence in the car. To Elaine, it seems like a very loud silence. She thinks to herself: Geez, I wonder if it bothers him that I said that. Maybe he's been feeling confined by our relationship; maybe he thinks I'm trying to push him into some kind of obligation that he doesn't want, or isn't sure of.

And Roger is thinking: Gosh. Six months.

And Elaine is thinking: But, hey, I'm not so sure I want this kind of relationship, either. Sometimes I wish I had a little more space, so I'd have time to think about whether I really want us to keep going the way we are, moving steadily toward . . . I mean, where are we going? Are we just going to keep seeing each other at this level of intimacy? Are we heading toward marriage? Toward children? Toward a lifetime together? Am I ready for that level of commitment? Do I really even know this person?

And Roger is thinking: . . . so that means it was . . . let's see .....February when we started going out, which was right after I had the car at the dealer's, which means . . . lemme check the odometer . . . Whoa! I am way overdue for an oil change here.

And Elaine is thinking: He's upset. I can see it on his face. Maybe I'm reading this completely wrong. Maybe he wants more from our relationship, more intimacy, more commitment; maybe he has sensed - even before I sensed it - that I was feeling some reservations. Yes, I bet that's it. That's why he's so reluctant to say anything about his own feelings. He's afraid of being rejected.

And Roger is thinking: And I'm gonna have them look at the transmission again. I don't care what those morons say, it's still not shifting right. And they better not try to blame it on the cold weather this time. What cold weather? It's 87 degrees out, and this thing is shifting like a damn garbage truck, and I paid those incompetent thieves $600.

And Elaine is thinking: He's angry. And I don't blame him. I'd be angry, too. God, I feel so guilty, putting him through this, but I can't help the way I feel. I'm just not sure.

And Roger is thinking: They'll probably say it's only a 90- day warranty. That's exactly what they're gonna say, the scumballs.

And Elaine is thinking: maybe I'm just too idealistic, waiting for a knight to come riding up on his white horse, when I'm sitting right next to a perfectly good person, a person I enjoy being with, a person I truly do care about, a person who seems to truly care about me. A person who is in pain because of my self-centered, schoolgirl romantic fantasy.

And Roger is thinking: Warranty? They want a warranty? I'll give them a damn warranty. I'll take their warranty and stick it right up their.... .

"Roger," Elaine says aloud.

"What?" says Roger, startled.

"Please don't torture yourself like this," she says, her eyes beginning to brim with tears. "Maybe I should never have . .Oh God, I feel so....."

(She breaks down, sobbing.)

"What?" says Roger.

"I'm such a fool," Elaine sobs. "I mean, I know there's no knight. I really know that. It's silly. There's no knight, and there's no horse."

"There's no horse?" says Roger.

"You think I'm a fool, don't you?" Elaine says.

"No!" says Roger, glad to finally know the correct answer.

"It's just that . . . It's that I . . . I need some time," Elaine says.

(There is a 15-second pause while Roger, thinking as fast as he can, tries to come up with a safe response. Finally he comes up with one that he thinks might work.)

"Yes," he says.

(Elaine, deeply moved, touches his hand.)

"Oh, Roger, do you really feel that way?" she says.

"What way?" says Roger.

"That way about time," says Elaine.

"Oh," says Roger. "Yes."

(Elaine turns to face him and gazes deeply into his eyes, causing him to become very nervous about what she might say next, especially if it involves a horse. At last she speaks.)

"Thank you, Roger," she says. "Thank you," says Roger.

Then he takes her home, and she lies on her bed, a conflicted, tortured soul, and weeps until dawn, whereas when Roger gets back to his place, he opens a bag of Doritos, turns on the TV, and immediately becomes deeply involved in a rerun of a tennis match between two Czechoslovakians he never heard of. A tiny voice in the far recesses of his mind tells him that something major was going on back there in the car, but he is pretty sure there is no way he would ever understand what, and so he figures. it's better if he doesn't think about it. (This is also Roger's policy regarding world hunger.)

The next day Elaine will call her closest friend, or perhaps two of them, and they will talk about this situation for six straight hours. In painstaking detail, they will analyze everything she said and everything he said, going over it time and time again, exploring every word, expression, and gesture for nuances of meaning, considering every possible ramification. They will continue to discuss this subject, off and on, for weeks, maybe months, never reaching any definite conclusions, but never getting bored with it, either.

Meanwhile, Roger, while playing racquetball one day with a mutual friend of his and Elaine's, will pause just before serving, frown, and say:

"Norm, did Elaine ever own a horse?

A friend of ours was walking down a deserted Mexican beach at sunset.

As he walked along, he began to see another man in the distance. As he grew nearer, he notice that the local native kept leaning down, picking something up and throwing it out into the water. Time and again he kept hurling things out into the ocean.

As our friend approached even closer, he noticed that the man was picking up starfish that had been washed up on the beach and, one at a time, he was throwing them back into the water. Our friend was puzzled. He approached the man and said, "Good evening, friend. I was wondering what you are doing."

"I'm throwing these starfish back into the ocean. You see, it's low tide right now and all of these starfish have been washed up onto the shore. If I don't throw them back into the sea, they'll die up here from lack of oxygen."

"I understand," my friend replied, "but there must be thousands of starfish on this beach. You can't possibly get to all of them. There are simply too many. And don't you realize this is probably happening on hundreds of beaches all up and down this coast. Can't you see that you can't possibly make a difference?"

The local native smiled, bent down and picked up yet another starfish, and as he threw it back into the sea, he replied, "Made a difference to that one!

My father is one of those men who relates his life story in such a fashion as to be long on instruction and short on accuracy. The impression he imparts is of a boyhood where every action was a struggle against hopeless odds, and his daily walk to the school bus involved countless miles, plus a fight to the death with some animal encountered along the way, like a wolverine or a killer whale. The reason I myself am so lacking in character can clearly be traced to the deficiency of significant life-threatening challenge when I was a small child, though I would have thought my mother's tuna noodle casserole would have qualified.

His infuriatingly revisionist memory once led us all into an episode my siblings and I refer to as "the year of the soup," though actually I think it only lasted four days. Here's what happened: my mother, who was at that point experimenting heavily with meals which employed nothing but can openers, made the mistake of setting a bowl of what we kids quickly labeled "Campbell's thick and pukey soup" in front of the man. This triggered in my father what drug abusers commonly refer to as a "flashback," signaled to the rest of us by a sudden wild look in his eyes. Fearing the imminent delivery of a character-building lecture, (a "falseback"), my sisters and I made to bolt from the table, but he froze us in place with the most terrifying words a father can utter to his children:

"When I was a boy..."

When my father was a boy, he went on to claim, his mother would concoct the most delicious of soups during the winter by use of an iron kettle, the fire place, and a potpourri of vegetables and table scraps. "It would boil for days, and the house would fill with the aroma!" My father thundered at us, daring us to call him a liar. "It was delicious!"

My mother took this to mean that my father considered her own cooking to be somewhat short of the delicious mark, something we kids had been asserting for years. She told him that if he wanted to prepare his own blessed dinners from now on that was fine with her, but she was darned if she was going to slave over a hot stove all day if this was the kind of thanks she was going to get.

She may not have actually said "blessed" and "darned."

The children were alarmed. Not at the historical inaccuracy--the only way it took her all day to slave over that soup was if she opened the can by chewing on it--but at the idea that my father might be allowed to try to recreate this insane fire place recipe. The kids, we were convinced, would be asked to actually eat the stuff, something which was sure to be impossible.

Normally my father would retreat in the face of my mother's anger. His own cooking was limited to the grill, where he would subject ground beef to flaming incineration in order to produce what he called hamburgers and his children dubbed "fireballs." Alas, at this point he was so delusional that he leaped up and proclaimed that the soup would "begin at once."

For the next three days the fireplace roared with culinary enthusiasm (it was July.) An iron kettle swung from a hook over the flames, its contents boiling and sending out a stench which made the whole house smell like Jeffrey Dahmer's apartment. True to his word, my father tossed anything he came across into the pot. "Chicken bones, excellent!" He triumphed. "Green beans, mushrooms, superb! Pot roast, fried eggs, captain crunch, cough syrup, cigarette butts, car mufflers, shrubs, hernias, tax forms--fantastic!"

Okay, maybe I exaggerate a little, but you get the point here. When his creation was deemed ready he served it up in depressingly large bowls--no way we were going to be able to feed all this to the dog.

"I'm not hungry," my sister claimed, eyeing her serving.

"I've got an appendicitis," I hurriedly added.

"I'm converting to a religion which won't let me eat sewage," my other sister declared, impressing us with originality.

My father would not hear our excuses, and so, reluctantly, we each raised our spoons.

It tasted exactly like what it was, which is to say, boiled garbage. "I am going to spew vomit," announced my sister, the one with the new religion.

"Pretty good, Dad," I countered, trying a different tack. I had managed to allow no more than a single molecule of his soup past my lips and now held my spoon in my lap, shoving the stewed pollution frantically toward the dog, who was sniffing at it suspiciously. When it realized my treacherous intent, it drew its lips back in a snarl.

My other sister appeared to have lost the gift of speech.

And then a miracle happened, a character forming incident even more educational than wrestling carnivores. With an odd expression, my father set his spoon down and faced his wife, who was regarding him with an arch look.

"This soup," he declared slowly, the rest of us listening attentively, "tastes... even worse than my mother's."

It is reported that the following edition of the Book of Genesis was discovered in the Dead Seal Scrolls. If authentic, it would shed some light on the question, "Where do pets come from?"

And Adam said, "Lord, when I was in the garden, you walked with me every day. Now I do not see you anymore. I am lonesome and it is difficult for me to remember how much you love me."

God said, "No problem! I will create a companion for you that will be with you forever and who will be a reflection of my love for you, so that you will know I love you, even when you cannot see me. Regardless of how selfish and childish and unlovable you may be, this new companion will accept you as you are and will love you as I do, in spite of yourself."

God created a new animal to be a companion for Adam. And it was a good animal. And God was pleased. And the new animal was pleased to be with Adam and he wagged his tail. And Adam said, "But Lord, I have already named all the animals in the Kingdom and all the good names are taken and I cannot think of a name for this new animal."

And God said, "No problem! Because I have created this new animal to be a reflection of my love for you, his name will be a reflection of my own name, and you will call him DOG."

And Dog lived with Adam and was a companion to him and loved him. And Adam was comforted. And God was pleased. And Dog was content and wagged his tail.

After a while, it came to pass that Adam's Guardian Angel came to the Lord and said, "Lord, Adam has become filled with pride. He struts and preens like a peacock and he believes he is worthy of adoration. Dog has indeed taught him that he is loved, but no one has taught him humility."

And the Lord said, "No problem! I will create for him a companion who will be with him forever and who will see him as he is. The companion will remind him of his limitations, so he will know that he is not always worthy of adoration."

And God created CAT to be a companion to Adam. And Cat would not obey Adam. And when Adam gazed into Cat's eyes, he was reminded that he was not the supreme being.

And Adam learned humility.

And God was pleased. And Adam was greatly improved. And Cat did not care one way or the other.

Debby wasn't home, and it was getting awfully late. Not knowing any of her girlfriend's phone numbers, her Mother fired-up Debbi's computer & saw a list of e-mail addresses. She sent a note to each name asking if they knew where her daughter was.

Within twenty minutes, she got back 16 replies all saying that she wasn't to worry, that Debby was spending the night at their house and had neglected to telephone.

When I was in high-school, Joel, a buddy of mine & I were discussing a girl from French class we had both befriended. Her family had recently relocated to the metro area from a farm way out in the sticks. We both agreed that we'd never met a sweeter girl before, but she was too naive & trusting. Joel said, "Listen, for her own good, and as her friends, we've got to teach her quickly what's right & what's wrong." I replied, "Agreed! You teach her what's right"

At a school in Oregon, the young girls were just starting to wear lipstick. They would go into the bathroom and put on their lipstick and kiss the mirror to blot it. The janitor was having a terrible time trying to get the mirror clean and keep it clean. He talked to the principle and the principle tried to talk to the girls, explaining how hard it was to clean the mirror of the lipstick.

It did no good, so he had all the girls come into the bathroom with the janitor so he could show them how hard it was to clean the mirror. The janitor took the scrub brush and scrubbed and scrubbed, the mirror was still a mess, and then he dipped the brush in the toilet and went back to the mirror and scrubbed again.

There has been no one kissing the mirror since.