CONTENTS UNDER PRESSURE: GETTING HIGH MARKS ON THE `HUH?? SCALE'

It's official. I'm another year older today.

I'm told wisdom comes with age. Au contraire. At least so far. What I've found instead is that the list of phenomena I just don't get is growing longer and longer.

There are a lot of things none of us get, I'm sure. The former Yugoslavia. Free radicals. (That's something to do with stopping wrinkles, not a political movement. Don't ask me to explain it.) Black holes, quarks, gravity and physics in general. Cosines. Logarithms.

It's like history. The longer you live, the more of it you have to learn. Of course, I prefer to think I'm witnessing current events.

A former teacher of mine explained it this way: If the president's dead, it's history. If the president's alive, but out of office, it's political science. If the president's alive and in the White House, it's current events.

Live long enough, and you'll be bombarded with so much information, none of it will sink in. Here we are right smack in the Information Age, and I dare you to find 10 people who have the slightest idea of what's going on in the world.

Don't ask me; I've only surfed the 'net a time or two. Barely got my toes wet.

Remember the dinosaurs? I think they died of confusion. "OK, Barney, explain evolution to me one more time. And hey! What are all these rocks falling out of the sky?"

Read enough newspapers or magazines, watch enough TV and it'll happen to you, too: Some snippet of information will send you into a brain spasm (Lisa Marie and Michael Wed) and you'll spend the rest of the day saying "Huh?" and humming Partridge Family songs.

If you don't recognize that reference, you're too young to be confused. Go watch TV.

Maybe a nice "Gilligan's Island" re-run.

So here's my list of issues that rate a 7 or higher on the `Huh?? Scale.'

The aforementioned Lisa Marie and Michael coupling. Still. Always. They marry (huh??). They divorce. Michael gets custody of Bubbles, and Lisa Marie, whose chief talent seems to lie in picking the wrong man, decides to become a pop music icon.

Wherever Elvis is, I bet he really needs a donut.

The concealed weapons debate. We can't control crime, so let's give everybody a gun, and none of us will therefore be criminals.

People who submit themselves to physical and mental anguish so they can belong to organizations that identify themselves by Greek letters, and then whine about it.

Just say no. Say it in Greek if you have to, but say it.

"If I can't go to the White House, I'll just go home." Gee, being a senior senator -- THE senior senator -- in the majority party must be rough. Maybe the sandbox isn't big enough.

Oasis. Mariah Carey. Jim Carrey. (Of course, I don't get "The Three Stooges" either.) Lionel Richie trying for a comeback.

Making every TV sitcom now in syndication into a feature film. What's next? "Three's Company: The Lost Years"?

Groups of armed people who proclaim they aren't citizens, stop paying taxes and then say it's unconstitutional for the government to take any punitive action. If they're not citizens and they don't have green cards, can't we deport them?

I think I love you! But what am I so afraid of? I'm afraid that I'm not sure of a love that there's cu-ure for....

~Peggy O'Farrell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.