In case you didn't notice, the world is not a perfect place. There's war, pollution, hunger, injustice, and of course Jessica Simpson. Even little things don't make sense: rush hour traffic not going anywhere, boxing at the Goodwill Games, DVDs showing us highlights of movies THAT WE'RE ABOUT TO WATCH.

One night, after being flagrantly overserved by a bartender, I scribbled on cocktail napkins a list of world improvements. I called it "If I Were God," then, as the beer wore on, "What Happened to My Childhood" and finally "Gibbledy Gobbledy Goo."

We'll stick with the editor-friendly, "In a Perfect World." The unabridged list is, unfortunately, swirling above a local landfill, but here are some napkins that survived the ride home.

Ahem.

In a perfect world...

• pug dogs would have a reasonable amount of skin on their face.
  
• boot would rhyme with foot.
  
• we'd get paid for the time we spend preparing for, commuting to, talking about, and unwinding from work.
  
• radio stations would keep their contest money and play some bloody music.
  
• all of a woman's issues could be fixed with WD-40 and duct tape.
  
• answering machines would come with a get-to-the-point button.
  
• breeding laws would limit couples to one child per 75 IQ points.
  
• athletes would retire only once.
  
• no man, including the husband, would ever be invited to a baby shower.
  
• traffic lights would change when we honk at them.
  
• O.J. Simpson would have married Lorena Bobbitt.
  
• priests who hear confessions would get paid the same as shrinks.
  
• our TV's brightness control would turn up the intelligence.
  
• if an officer has to tackle the suspect to make an arrest, the officer would be entitled to three free punches.
  
• when people graduate high school, they'd also graduate high school mentality.
  
• the game of "peekaboo" would have an official end.
  
• decaf coffee would come in a different color.
  
• political speech writers would deliver the speeches.
  
• freeways would grow at the same rate as the population.
  
• somebody would confiscate Dennis Miller's thesaurus.
  
• all movies would be formatted to fit your screen without apology or explanation.
  
• when a woman gets a permanent, that's it -- no changing.
  
• lawyers would speak a language that humans understand.
  
• walkie-talkie cell phones would exist only in hell, where they were invented.
  
• sick days would include when you're sick of work.
  
• when teams lose on Fan Appreciation Day, spectators would get their money back.
  
• naming your son Sandy would qualify as child abuse.
  
• weight gain would be caused not by food but by some undelicious thing like televangelism.
  
• the Meyers would get together with the Myers would settle the spelling once and for all.
  
• the calf bone would have more meat on it.
  
• every driver would understand the Merge Concept.
  
• a man and woman would never know which one will end up pregnant.
  
• football games would never end on a field goal.
  
• we could surgically remove that part of our brain that plays the same snippet of music over and over and over.
  
• everyone would die on their one-hundredth birthday while having sex.
  

But the world is not perfect, so we have storms and train wrecks and Jessica Simpson, left to wonder about a God who would have it this way. It would be too much to handle but for a gift from this same Creator, something to iron out the wrinkles and put the whole world back in perspective. And that is lots of beer.

So it goes.

Did you hear about the tarot whiz who got hit by a truck?

She didn't see it coming.

Ha! Tarot card readers can be fun, especially when they're your wife and you can tease them in print. Yahaira, my little gypsy, has researched tarot, taken the quizzes, even spoken to a profoundly obese woman who speaks with the dead (a large medium).

There was, of course, a learning curve in Yahaira's early readings:

"You will suffer tremendously. Bankruptcy. Divorce. PAIN! ... No, wait. I'm looking at the wrong thing."

My wife received with her cards, at no extra charge, a "dowsing crystal" that responds to life's difficult questions by spinning in circles (an approach I've used for years).

"Gimme a question," said Yahaira. "Any question."

"Okay. Who are you and what have you done with my real wife?"

What surprises me is how society, for all its learning, persists with drawn-out court trials when we have at our disposal something as simple and decisive as the dowsing crystal. Surely it could have done better with O.J.

One day Yahaira had a falling out with her crystal, which was being, in her words, "a punk." She punished the crystal by stuffing it into her underwear drawer, the ultimate insult for talking objects.

She returned to her favorite tarot whiz, Joann Bunning, who frankly takes the fun out of teasing. Bunning makes tarot sound almost ... reasonable.

"The cards," she says, "are just tools to discover deeper truths about ourselves."

One truth we discovered is that Yahaira is closely related to Rain Man. With each reading, she demands more silence, shushing me even when I'm quiet. She lays the cards on wood -- earth energy -- which I am forbidden to touch. And that's the beauty of tarot: It combines the wisdom of the ages with the madness of obsessive-compulsive disorder.

"This is the Wheel of Fortune," she said, tapping a card. "It can mean a lot of things: chance encounters, revelation, a twist of fate."

"Guess we'll have to wait for Vanna to flip over more letters."

Yahaira gave me the stink-eye, still upset from when I accused her of dealing from the bottom of the deck.

"Very interesting," she said. "The Jack of Cups is upside down again."

(Cards have different meanings when they're upside down, same as humans.)

If I take the cards lightly, it's only because I'm a fan of free will. If I were a psychic, my readings would go like this:

"You will make tons of money, have a tight family, and feel supremely content ... orrrr you will fight with your spouse, keep changing jobs, and hate to wake up in the morning ... depending on the choices you make."

Yahaira has started doing tarot in bed. She sits up tall, closes her eyes, and spreads the cards out wide (the worst kind of bedspread). And I am not allowed to blink or wiggle or otherwise clear my throat lest our fates are screwed up forever. So it goes.

I can't blame my wife for playing on The Other Side. This one has been totally ruined by science. I myself long daily for angels or UFOs or Bigfoot -- anything to upset the box. Where are all the miracles now that we have camcorders?

Last night Yahaira was up till three a.m. asking the cards whether I've ever cheated on her. I knew enough to make-believe-snore till I fell asleep. It's not that I had anything to hide; it's just that she was getting pretty intense and I didn't want to end up in the underwear drawer.