I give myself an "F" for the day

If I would add a new word to the dictionary, it would be "pregret."

Everyone is familiar with "regret." It's what you do after you enter a congested freeway, after you go on a 6 week diet of only hamburgers, or after you start an affair with an ablutophobic. Lots of people spend lots of time regretting things, and I think I can confidently say I belong to this group of people.

With pregret, you could save yourself the effort of saying "I am going to regret doing this," and instead go straight to saying "I pregret this." Like, "I pregret not going to sleep right now in order to wake up early to pack," or "I pregret watching a movie instead of writing that report." With this word, you could acknowledge your feeling right away instead of living in a state of consternation over the regret you'll feel later, and just get on with it. I've pregretted lots of things in the past, so it seems I'm in a perpetual state of pregretting or regretting.

I just found a book on a shelf entitled "The Book of Myself." Before I opened it, I thought it would be some sort of a long survey with questions like "My favorite color is" or "I feel best in this underwear." But instead, it's a book with 201 questions heading full pages of lines in order to answer questions like "For a while I thought I would marry this person, but I didn't," "My hope for the nation is that..." and "I feel like I could have raised my children better by...". This might be because it's 2:50 AM, but this book strikes me as extremely depressing. The old age section is filled with stuff about the bridges you've burned, the people you wish you would have spent more time with, the career you would have chosen if you would have changed mid-life, and things you never got around to doing. It's also got equally irritating and explorative (new word? maybe?) questions that I wouldn't feel like answering if I were to write an autobiography, as the back of the book suggests I do if I want to get started.

If I were going to write an autobiography, I think I'd go straight to the text message section of my cell phone. I realize that this cell phone is different from my original one, but still, since nearly every message in my inbox and outbox are saved, it's interesting to review what was going on when I sent the messages. Tonight, since Mary Kate and I were stuck in a parking lot for over an hour, it was great fun to reread the messages to remember exactly what I was thinking when I sent a message like "ditto HELP" or "to the color BLUE." (all caps figure quite prominently in any of my text messages).

In any case, the point is that I suggesting putting pregret into the dictionary. I also suggest listing alternate pronunciations for "catastrophe," "sieve," and "vaginal," but well, that's just me.