My Point...And I Do Have One

a desert isle, or, in the worst-case scenario, mistakenly buried alive. But, luckily for you, you’ve been buried alive with this book—even though it may be difficult to turn the pages. Also, the lighting probably isn’t that good.
    Then again, when you’re buried alive, eye strain is probably the least of your worries.
    Some people need a crutch in learning to talk to themselves, so they talk to their television sets first. If for some reason you feel that talking to a TV is less insane than talking to yourself, then more power to you. If you’re not sure how to begin talking to your TV, here are a few sample starter phrases:
    “Oh boy, this is going to be fun fun funny.”
    “Look out behind you!”
    “I think you’re lying. I don’t think it’s going to rain tomorrow. What do you say about them apples, Mr. Weatherman?”
    “Oh yeah, laugh while you got the chance, you criminal scum. Because I got the feeling that in a few minutes that laugh is gonna be wiped off your face by Barnaby Jones, P.I.”
    After you’ve gotten the hang of talking to your television you can begin the weaning process by moving on to talking to your radio. If you already sing along with your radio, this will be especially easy for you; though you may want to switch from a music station to talk radio—which, I should note, was specifically designed for people who talk to themselves. If you already sing along to talk radio, well … I don’t know what to say. You’re on your own.
    From there on, the weaning process will be easier and easier for you. You’ve already moved from talking to your TV to talking to your radio. You follow this by talking to your toaster (“Oh yes, make it brown and crisp, just the way I like it.”), then to your toast, then your pen, then your pencil, then your eraser, then you talk to a tiny piece of lint in your pocket, and finally you’re ready, willing, and able to talk to yourself.
    Remember, a person who talks to herself is a healthy person. There’s nothing wrong with it. In fact, there was a survey done on people who talk to themselves.…
    “No, there wasn’t.”
    “Yes, there was. Hey, how did I get back in here?”
    “I had a key to the door, ha ha ha.”
    “The survey said that 90 percent of all people talk to themselves.”
    “I’m crazy. I’m just making that up.”
    “Oh, no I’m not. I read it; it’s healthy.”
    “I’m just saying that because I want to feel better about myself.”
    I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to stop right here. I and myself have an appointment to go to couples therapy to try to work out some of these issues. In the meantime, good luck in talking to yourselves.

ellen’s sure-fire
cures for the
things that ail ye

    C ontrary to what you may have heard, I am not a doctor. I do not play a doctor on TV (if you think that I do, then you either have some sort of attention disorder or you’ve been watching the wrong show). I have not even played “Doctor” for a very long time—at least fifteen years … okay, ten.
    I do not own a stethoscope. Your medical insurance, no matter how good, will never cover anything that I do. If you were to see me on the street and yell out, “Hey, Doc, how’s it going?” I would walk away without responding (thinking to myself that you either mistook me for somebody else or were potentially dangerous). I cannot legally prescribe drugs.
    I have no medical training whatsoever. Since I was raised a Christian Scientist, in high school I was excused from all science classes; I wasn’t supposed to learn about the human body. On the plus side, I never had to dissect a frog. (I don’t see why anybody has to dissect a frog these days; I know I’d be upset if a giant frog came to earth and decided that he wanted to dissect humans, and I bet that nine out of ten Americans would agree with me in regard to the giant frog. The tenth guy … well, he’s the kind of person that, if you happen to see him walking down the street, it’s probably best that you avoid eye contact.)
    The negative side of being excused from all those science classes was that for the longest time I didn’t know anything about the human body at all. When my stomach hurt, I said I had a stomach
cake
—I didn’t know it was stomachache. While that sort of mistake is cute in a four-year-old, in a teenager it raises a few eyebrows. There are still parts of the human body that I’m just learning about now (internal parts—I know the