I realized today that, whenever I am speaking to my dog, I say the same thing twice. "What do you have there?" I will say, followed immediately by, "What do you have there?" Or, worse, I will emphasize the words the second time, as if she were a retarded child: "What. Do. You. Have. There?"

Sometimes, when people ask me why I do the bizarre things I do, I can answer immediately in a way that makes sense. I scratch an itch with the backs of my fingers, for example, because I have chewed my fingernails off. (I realize this still makes no sense, but I am not going to draw a diagram.) And yet, if someone were to ask me why I say everything twice to Goblin, I would not know the answer. Perhaps I feel that she did not hear me the first time, or that she needs to think about the question for a moment before she gets back to me. ("Well, Daddy, since you asked . . . twice . . . I appear to have a wadded-up paper towel with a chicken bone in it, which I found in the gutter.")

More likely, this is related to my habit of not paying the remotest amount of attention to what comes out of my mouth (unless I happen to have food poisoning, when the things that come out of my mouth are more conspicuous). Yesterday, I had brunch with a new friend of mine, Lauri. When she showed up, I said, "How are you?" Five seconds later, I caught myself saying it again: "So, how are you?", possibly feeling that shifting the emphasis would garner a different response.

More than one of you reading this will recall my tendency to have the same conversation with the same person multiple times, expecting different results after each.

Oh, well. Oh, well.

So, how are you?