Halloween came a week early this year when I came perilously close to chopping the tip of my left thumb off. It’s been months since my last knife wound thanks in part to knife skills lessons from various and sundry professionals (thank you, Obi Wan) and from a year’s worth of diligent practice; but it was like Dan Akroyd’s Julia Child from the late 1970’s SNL skit where blood just shoots out all over the place in a fountain of red corn syrup. Hilarious. Only mine was plasma and platelets which are apparently necessary to sustain human life. Anyway, I spent a large part of the afternoon with my left hand propped over my head wrapped in a roll of paper towels trying to avoid a trip to the emergency room for stitches since I let my health insurance lapse a few weeks ago. Eventually the bleeding slowed enough for me coat the digit with enough neosporin to support two girls in a mud wrestling vat and to dress it with a sterile bandage and cover it with a rubber glove so I could continue cooking.

And that wasn’t the only creepy occurrence. 

There was this little thing a while back where my subconscious rendered an ex boyfriend dead. As in totally kaput. Morto.

Yes, I had a dream, but not a dream in a MLK or a copper pot kind of way, oh no. It was like when Jimmy Smitts was written out of NYPD Blue: there were tears and there was pleading and then the dude died. As in dead. As disco. And I woke up sweaty and full of guilt and shame (guilt because I realized the One Night Stand-Up was sleeping next to me, and shame because technically I should now refer to him as the “Two Night Stand-Up”, which isn’t nearly as funny).