Happy Yom Kippur to all y'all who are celebrating! Actually, since it's the Day of Atonement, I'm not sure if you're supposed to say "Happy ..." But it has a better ring to it than "Somber Yom Kippur!"

I, for one, am having a great Yom Kippur, because I have the day off. Working for the French, we get a lot of French, American, and assorted religious holidays. The only consistent thing about all of these is that none of my coworkers - regardless of their religion or nationality - seems to actually observe any of these occasions. And yet, we have off for Colombus Day and Good Friday and Bastille Day. Not that I'm complaining.

I'm not religious, but I think we should have a national Day of Atonement. Maybe not atonement, per se, but more like an "amnesty day" for calling all the people you've accidentally lost touch with, or to apologize to folks you might have offended/ annoyed/ accidentally barfed in their laundry hampers, etc. This would also go for anyone we might be holding a grudge against, and not just because it really annoys people who hate you when you're nice to them.

The other day, Paul was telling me how every Chinese New Year, he and a friend would call up everyone they'd had any issues with, or friends they'd forgotten to call, or whatever, over the past year. I guess the Chinese have a tradition of making amends at the New Year. (Not that Paul is Chinese, but, hey, if Madonna can wear a yarmukle, then Paul can be General Tso.)

Unfortunately, I have a chronically long list of people to whom I owe phone calls, emails, letters, etc. Instead, I choose to be proactive, by which I mean actively worrying about not calling them, sure that they hate and/or have forgotten me by now. But then, the more time goes by, the more I'm afraid to call because I think they think I don't care about them. It's all very mature.

When faced with any challenge, I turn to the "Personal Growth" aisle at Barnes & Noble. In my self-help book du jour (don't ask ...), I learned that this is from thinking with the "reptilian" parts of the brain. Occasionally my decisions come from the "mammal" or even "primate" parts of the brain, but rarely from the more recently evolved neocortex, or "human" part of the brain.

For all you suckers who belive in "evolution," despite the fact that the President of the United States has assured us that "the jury's still out" on this hocus-pocus, the human brain is composed of many layers, which can explain most of our behaviors. For instance, the "fight or flight" instinct These range from the primordial brain-stem which comes from the age when reptiles came up out of the water, up through the modern parts of the brain that has given us things like art, science, and computers, and back to the primate parts of the brain that primarily use computers to download porn.

I wish I could send an email to all my long-lost friends and say, gee, I'm sorry I never got back to you, but, see, the reptilian section of my brain was avoiding a painful stimulus.

Maybe Hallmark makes a "Shoebox Greetings" card to that effect?