This is a photograph of my front room. Tell me you have never felt like this. This is how my camera felt after this year's Thanksgiving, which is not the the day after New Year's Eve, but for me it was. I ate too much of too many kinds of cuisine that left me with a food hangover.

For this reason, I was able to get some extra bed-time that I used to condense all the advice my mother gave me over time and put it in a single sentence. This is it: Be smart and act dumb. Dumb yourself down, way down.

Of course, I am totally against this idea, and it left a gargantuan rift between us. I can be really dumb as a matter of course, because book learning and street smarts are not the same they tell me, although everything I ever read about Beowulf has happened to or around me. Some people say it happened because I read it. Where do you draw the line between psychology and superstition?

It feels like a women's issue, and that put me in mind of a set of photographs I found in Aperature, Ireland: A Troubled Mirror, in particular Amelia Stein's The Four Rules of the Women of Ireland, dated 1992. You will not find the Stein's bride in Bride's magazine.

Before you pick this book up, I have to tell you it involves nudity of a female person and might be difficult to explain to a grade-school aged child.

By the way, Thanksgiving was the best one ever, and I'd do it again.