This week just won't quit. Today? A flat tire. Very flat. Christopher put the spare on, in the freezing pre-dawn air, and was late for work. I'm off again today to go to the tire place and see what's up, as we're getting ready to road trip to our little hearts are content, or at least in Asheville.

Our nice Spanish-speaker-only neighbor -- (he and his roommate have two pretty kitties, one named Lauren, the other Bacall) -- went and got a tire jack, even though we already had one, and offered it to us smiling and monosyllabic. We are English-speakers-only, and so the language barrier is pretty close to completely unbreachable. We hope we didn't offend him by turning down the jack. He got in his little red car, not even shutting the trunk all the way, and sped off, with loud Spanish dance music pumping. (Actually, I'm beginning to have a theory that he's actually hard-of-hearing from listening to the music so loud in his car, and not mono-lingual at all.)

So, anyway, flat tire=crisis of the day.

On a happier note, my friend Michaelangelo Matos has a charming piece up at Nerve, that you can see now but will soon be premium content. So, go read it before then: "69 (years of) love songs: the best agony anthems from 1934-2002".