I went to sleep last night reading Kurt Vonnegut and wondering why girls don't like to date philosophy majors.

The Vonnegut book is called Timequake and it's about a burp in the space-time continuum that results in everyone having to relive everything between February 17, 1991 and February 13, 2001.

People are aware that they have lived their experiences and remember everything they have lived through but have no power to change anything the second time.

The author likens it to a play. The actors know exactly what's going to happen to them but no matter how terrible their characters' fate they must follow their predetermined paths.

The book is mostly an opportunity for him to make observations. I've always thought that the ability to notice things is any writer's most necessary knack. Kurt Vonnegut has bushels of it. Otherwise how could he think to describe the make work the government created to give people jobs during the Great Depression as "cleaning birdsh*t out of cuckoo clocks."

Perhaps I could be so eloquent if only I hated my mother and father. "If you really want to hurt your parents, and don't have nerve enough to be homosexual," he writes, "the least you can do is go into the arts."

But don't aspire to philosophy, says Christie, one of my co-workers. Not as noted a writer, sure, but she does produce the weekend newscasts now. On her first free weekend after a recent breakup, she hooked up at a local, ah, meeting place named Lynagh's with some fellow named Jacob. She said later that he was weird but considered seeing him again because, quoting here, "he's so hot!"

Apparently the young man's off-putting personality was connected to his college major. He had majored in philosophy. After learing that, Christie said, "it was all downhill from there."

Take that insight, Kurt.

For all that wisdom, Christie couldn't tell me what a good major for a potential mate would be. But I already knew the answer: Pre-law.

It's bedtime again. I'll read more Vonnegut and wonder why I couldn't dislike my parents enough to write like him.

I'll bury me in envy.
I'll sow the silly seeds.
They'll spring a thing of beauty.
And I'll not know what it means.
It'll be loud inside my head.
I'll shake as chaos clings.
I'll be almost free.
And I'll wake as echoes ring.

Or maybe I'll just set my alarm.

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