After years of reading annoying books written by self-righteous people about how to demolish negative beliefs with cheery affirmations, I have decided to a) burn all those books and b) to simply abstain from the sort of running inner-commentary that criticizes my body, self, etc..in other words My Inner Critic (who I like to call Martha). Forget affirmations, they're like bad commercials in my head. I've decided I'm just going to have an empty brain. I'm boring. Who cares. It's better than having Dennis Miller rants in my head about every unfortunate thing to happen to life, from greying hair (which is very, very sad) to governments that insidiously try to silence journalists by blaming them for creating Anti-Americanism abroad (yeah, like it's NEWSWEEK'S fault that the whole world hates America...can you tell I'm in a bad mood?)

Anyway, this past weekend my inner-child suddenly decided that she absolutely HAD to re-paint the window sill because my window sill was chipped and looking highly unattractive. And it seemed like if I fixed that little thing in my life, other problems wouldn't look so bad. So, I went to the hardware store and bought some oil based paint, forgetthing that that's the kind that gets all over everything and is hard to clean up. In the proces of getting paint all over my body and my apartment, I somehow got it on my dishes. And now my dishes are poisoned and I'm convinced that my Inner-Critic is punishing me for refraining from it's negative diatribe with OIL BASED PAINT (I just need to blame something for the fact that I decided to start painting at 8:00 PM on Saturday right before I was going out...why? Because my inner-critic is trying to hurt me!).

Just for today, I can protect myself from my Inner Critic.