As I do from time to time, I’m taking a little bit of a blog pause, but I encourage all of you to go straight over to Netflix and watch all seven series of Peep Show.

“I think I’ll go out for lunch,” she’d say, and her coworker would look at her like she was a bomb about to go off.

“Okay,” her coworker would say. “Are you sure you really want to do that? I mean, it’s up to you. But why exactly do you want to go out for lunch?”

“I’m going to the movies with Sharon this weekend,” she’d tell her mother.

“Oh,” her mother would say. “Well, alright, if you’re sure that’s what you want to do. Are you absolutely sure that’s what you want to do?”

“I think I’m going to go to nursing school,” she told her best friend, Sharon.

“Really?” Sharon said. “Um, okay. I mean…okay, if you’re really sure that’s what you want to do. But do you mind if I ask why you thought of that? Are you really, really sure that’s the best career choice for you?”

It all started to get to Rebecca. She wondered if she was stark out of her fucking mind somehow, and everyone could see it but her. She began to doubt every single thing she did. She couldn’t make the simplest decisions. She couldn’t pick out her clothes in the morning. She couldn’t decide whether to eat breakfast or skip breakfast or throw her breakfast out onto the lawn. She’d get in the car and scream and close her eyes and drive at random. She quit her job one day, begged for it back the next, went out with a guy one day, broke up with him the next, made appointments that she didn’t keep, impulse purchased big luxury items that she sold on eBay two days later.

Eventually, she decided she just needed to get away from it all. She would travel to Europe for the summer!

“Oh, Rebecca,” said everyone she knew. “Are you really sure that’s the best idea? I mean, can we just ask what exactly your reasoning is behind it? I mean, it’s fine if that’s what you want to do, but are you sure that’s what you want to do?” They looked at her as if she was dangling an infant off the top of a 40-story building, and also as if she herself was that infant.

“Yes!” she said. “I am absolutely sure that’s what I want to do!”

The next day Rebecca sat on the plane to Paris. She heaved a sigh of relief. It was so nice to have a little vacation. She couldn’t wait to see the world. She felt unfettered, carefree. She tugged absently at the ribbon around her neck and wondered why she’d always worn it. When had that started? What was the purpose? Why had she never questioned it until this moment? She decided that she would take it off already. She didn’t need anybody to make her double-guess her decision. She didn’t need anybody else’s opinion at all. She untied the bow.

Rebecca’s head detonated instantly. The massive explosion blasted the aircraft to bits and the fiery wreckage plummeted into the ocean below.

“Here’s what I don’t understand about where you live,” said the firepit person. “If you’re all underwater, how do you keep yourselves on fire?”

“We’re not on fire at all,” said the underwater person. “We’re wet people, not fire people.”

“Right, I get that,” said the firepit person. “But with the wetness…don’t you just keep accidentally extinguishing yourselves?”

“No, see,” said the underwater person. “We were never on fire to begin with. No fire.”

“Right, but I’m just saying, when I’m wet, I put it out with a towel. Haven’t you all ever considered doing that? Then, you can stop the wetness before it puts out the fire.”

“No, we WANT to be wet. We don’t WANT to be on fire.”

“I mean, you can be on fire, if you try a little harder. Like, I drink water, too, but I don’t let it rule me.”

“Look, I don’t know how to explain this to you any better. We’ve never been on fire, ever. We have no desire to be on fire. We’re not trying to be on fire. We will never be on fire.”

“You could be if you tried harder.”

“Okay, to put it another way, why aren’t you wet? Why are you all on fire? Why don’t you go underwater and put your fire out?”

“Because it would put the fire out, you daft idiot!”

Meanwhile, everyone else at the party was quietly resolving that they would never invite both of these guys to the same event ever again.

“What is this place?” said William. “It’s so hydrating and luxurious!”

“It is is such a place as cannot be mended: it is the descent whither the scum and filth that attends conviction for sin doth continually run, and therefore it is called the Slough of Despond,” said Christian, the leader.

“Well!” said William. “It is warm and relaxing! And it is doing wonders for my skin!”

“Verily, it is a loathsome place,” said Christian. “Only a fool wouldst enjoy it.”

“Different strokes,” said William. “It’s so squishy between my toes! It’s nice to just float and not to have to think for a little bit.”

“We must push on to the wicket-gate and from thence to the brave Country,” said Christian.

“Y’all go on ahead,” said William. “I’ll catch up in a bit.”

The rest of the pilgrims pulled themselves out of the Slough and William continued to float on his back.

“Jesus,” he said to a nearby frog. “There goes an insufferable group of people. I mean, I was raised not to yap on about your religion. It’s super awkward.”

“There are such things to be had which they spoke of,” observed the frog. “And many more Glories besides; If you believe not me, read here in this Book; and for the truth of what is exprest therein, behold, all is confirmed by the blood of him that made it.”

William sighed. “Do you know if there’s a bar anywhere around here?”

The root of this old woman’s general suspiciousness was that, when she was 25 years old, she had murdered an entire family just for fun. And she had never been found out. So, if that was in her past, what on Earth must everyone else be hiding?

One day, Frederick saw that all the other lemmings had gathered together in a huge group. He was thrilled! The other lemmings never wanted to have a party. He didn’t even mind he’d missed the invite. He ran across the field hollering, “Hey guys! Hey, it’s me, Frederick! What’s going on? What are we up to?”

The other lemmings had actually gathered for the express purpose of figuring out how to arrange for Frederick to be eaten by a predator. When they saw him coming, they began to run as a group. They ran and ran and ran, and Frederick chased along behind. “Guys,” he hollered. “Wait up! I learned this new game the other day – I’ll explain it!”

The lemmings all came to a cliff, but they were running so fast and they were blinded by the crowd, and they ran right off the edge of it and plummeted to their deaths below. All of them. Frederick arrived at the cliff’s edge and screeched to a stop.

“Oh, guys,” he whispered.

The winter was long and horrible. Frederick dug tunnels in the snow, hunting far and wide for sedges and grasses and finding few. He was hungry and cold, and most of all lonely. He felt like he was the sole survivor of a terrible apocalypse. Several times, a coyote or a fox came within spitting distance and Frederick knew it was only the snow that was keeping him alive. He awaited spring as his certain death, and he hoped that it would be quick and painless.

Moral: If all your friends jump off a cliff, be sure to keep up.

Felicity had a really hard time of it.

The other faeries didn’t know what to make of Felicity. They tried to be nice to her, but they reacted to everything she did with raised eyebrows and silence. They exchanged glances and smiled ever so patiently. They made a special effort to approach Felicity one by one at parties and ask her how she was doing. They’d listen, nodding and smiling with great sympathy to her giggling, gaseous, red-faced reply. “That’s wonderful, Felicity,” they would say, beautifully. “I’m so glad you’ve come.” Then, their duty done, they’d return to their tidy, floating groups, their voices rising and falling like tinkling chimes on the breeze.

Felicity spent a lot of time flying around the woods by herself. Because she was so heavy, she flew lower to the ground than most faeries, and one day, her feet smacked right into the head of a dwarf, who was digging up mushrooms.

“Whoa,” said the dwarf. “What was that? Are you a bat?”

“I’m sorry,” giggled Felicity. “I’m not a bat, I’m a fairy.” And then, being nervous, she let one.

“Wooooo-hoooo!” hollered the dwarf, executing a series of cartwheels. “What a ripper! You’re no faery. Faeries never fart, that much I know. And they look totally different than you – I’ve seen ‘em. Also, they don’t stop to talk to the likes of me.”

“I’m not a very good fairy,” said Felicity.

“Dwarves would love you, though,” said the dwarf, and so he took her back to meet all the other dwarves, who were about a billion times more fun than the stupid faeries, and Felicity lived with them ever after and was perfectly happy.

She believed her sister was named Amber or Ruby or Pearl, and that she had long, shiny black hair and violet eyes. All day, as she ran through the castle, through the warm and cozy living quarters where she stayed with her Nanny, down to the bustling meeting rooms next to the grand reception hall, past the cavernous kitchen that smelled of baking bread, and into the cold, stone labyrinthine passages with the empty rooms where no one ever went, she kept her eyes peeled for a flash of motion in the corner of her eye, and her ears pricked for a laugh or a sneeze or a mutter.

One day, Kyla was tiptoeing down a ghostly passage in the bowels of the castle where she’d never been before when she heard a thin, high voice singing. She followed the voice, looking into room after room, but they were all empty, or filled with old junk. Finally, at the very end of the passage, Kyla turned a corner she couldn’t see from the other end, and there was a little girl with long black hair and violet eyes sitting on an upturned bucket and singing to herself.

“Hi,” said Kyla.

“Hi,” said the little girl. “I’m Ruby. Who are you?”

“I’m your sister!” said Kyla. “Kyla! I’ve been looking for you for years.”

“When I was very little,” said Ruby. “I chased a kitten down a lot of hallways, and I could never find my way back. No one looked for me.”

“I figured something like that happened,” said Kyla. “I just knew it. Come on – I know the way back.”

But when Kyla tried to lead Ruby back to the living quarters, none of the hallways seemed to be laid out the way they had been before. The girls kept running into dead ends, and strange little closed-over courtyards, and big, echoing chambers that neither of them had seen before. They went up and down staircases and they peered through windows, but nothing looked the same.

“This is weird,” said Kyla.

“I think it’s me,” said Ruby. “I’m cursed or something. If you leave me here and go on without me, you’ll be able to find your way home.”

“I would never do that!” said Kyla. “I’ve looked for you too long.”

The girls wandered for weeks, never finding their way back.

Eventually, Kyla’s family launched an all-out search of the castle to find their missing daughter. They canvassed every nook and cranny, and at last, they found Kyla down in the very bottom of an old abandoned dungeon. She had died of starvation and she was clutching an old mop.

“Why do we live in this crazy castle?” her mother wept. “It’s insane! Who even built it?”

“Don’t take this out on the castle,” said her father. “You’re pretty lucky you get to live in the biggest castle in the world.” But when the rescue party turned around to go back, they became hopelessly lost. They never found their way out, either, and they all perished somewhere in there and were never seen again.

One day, Julie’s coworker gave her a little wrapped box, saying that she just saw it and thought of her. Julie ripped it open excitedly. It was a little paperweight with a bluebird in the middle (Julie loved bluebirds).

“Thank you!” said Julie. “I love it!”

And she did love it, but not as much as she had when it was wrapped. Julie absently picked up the scraps of torn wrapping paper, wrapped them back over the paperweight, and ripped open the present again. “Yay!” she thought to herself, as the paperweight was revealed. Then, Julie remembered that she had some leftover wrapping paper in her desk from the previous Christmas. She got it out, wrapped the paperweight up, and ripped it open again.

“Yay!” Julie whispered. She wrapped it again, ripped it open again.

Julie did this all afternoon. Her coworker watched her. She was greatly disturbed.

On her way home that evening, Julie stopped off at the drugstore and bought as much wrapping paper, tissue, ribbons and bows as she could carry. She went home and spent all night wrapping every single thing in her house. She wrapped the chairs and the tables. She wrapped the sofa. She wrapped the paintings on the walls. She wrapped every dish in every cupboard, each piece of flatware in the drawers, all the cans in the pantry and the produce in the fridge. She wrapped batteries and coasters and lamps and shoes and all of her clothes and toiletries. She rolled up her rugs and wrapped them. She wrapped the doors. She wrapped the walls. She climbed the roof and wrapped the chimney and put a giant bow on top of the house.

Then, she began to wrap herself. She wrapped her nose and her ears and each finger and toe. She wrapped her arms and legs. She wrapped each of her eyes. She wrapped every hair on her head. And then she sat very still and waited to be a surprise.

“I just don’t understand the things,” he would say to the younger people in the office. “They are totally beyond me. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks. I don’t get ‘em, I don’t want to get ‘em. I can’t, with the windows and the menus and the software, and the – no. I just can’t deal with them. Huh uh. Can’t do it, don’t want to fool with it.”

This man would write out things long hand, and then give them to the younger people to type into the computer. He would never email, but would insist on calling people by phone and leaving voicemails, and then he would complain about not getting an answer until the younger people in the office sent an email. He would use obsolete paper forms in triplicate, which he had kept stockpiles of, and he would send those forms to accounting and shipping and so forth, and when they called to ask where he had even gotten such an old form, he would say, “I’m sorry, I cannot fool with those computers, with the boxes and do you click, or do you type, and I just – nuh-uh. No way.” Then the younger people in the office would have to resubmit the forms online.

Today, though, this man is easily using a computer along with everyone else, and if his office ever changes up the software, he learns it in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.

Moral: All us old dogs can quickly acquire new tricks by the bagful if there’s a bad enough recession on.