By Jim Knipfel

LAST WEEK, MORGAN and I were up in the New York offices of XM Satellite Radio, talking to our friend Bill, who runs a couple of the channels up there.

I've known Bill for a few years now, since shortly before XM went on the air. After talking to him on the train one night, we found we had quite a bit in common—he even lived in the same neighborhood. He's a good fellow.

We chatted about all sorts of things while we were there, from my old days in the bughouse, to famous people who've died as a result of autoerotic asphyxiation, to "The Girls Movie," which remains—to me at least—one of the most fascinating American cultural phenomena of its time.

I'm sure most of you know exactly what I'm talking about. One day every year between third and eighth grade, all the girls in school were shuttled into one room to watch the shadowy and mysterious "girls movie." All the boys, meanwhile, were crammed into another room and shown a movie about football or some Three Stooges shorts to keep us distracted. We never knew exactly what the "girl's movie" was about; the assumption was that this was where they were learning all of their dark secrets and arcane magic tricks. Even after the kid whose mom was a nurse tried to explain it to a few of us, we were still pretty lost. All we knew was that it was forbidden, and that the girls always smirked at us enigmatically for a few days afterward.

It remained a mystery only until ninth grade, when the school district in Green Bay premiered its first "co-ed" version of the girls film.

Man, that raised a mighty shitstorm all over town. Parents pulled their kids out of school, protest groups were hastily formed and angry editorials ran in all the newspaper about this "filthy and pornographic" movie that was about to be shown to the children.

I saw it in my school gym with about two dozen other kids and about 40 or 50 parents. It wasn't filthy; it wasn't pornographic. More than anything else, all those animated line drawings of internal organs were confusing. I was pretty sure I knew the basics before seeing the movie, but afterward I wasn't so sure anymore.

But you know, that's all completely beside the point.

One of the things that Bill brought up more than once while we chatted was finding significance in the most insignificant of things, in getting potentially interesting stories out of something that might seem utterly mundane and banal at first (or second) glance. It's an idea, or practice, or whatever you'd care to call it, upon which I've been trying to maintain a career for many years now, and something I fully believe in.

"Attitude"—there's a good term for it. Approaching the world with the attitude that there's a story in most everything, if you look at it closely enough or from the right angle. Not always a pretty, pleasant story, but a story nevertheless. And if people would take those fucking cellphones out of their ears and listen and look at the things going on around them as they walked down the street and rode the trains, they might be surprised at how many stories they run into. I can't get to or from the subway on any given day without running into something I want to stash away for later use.

(Just this morning, as an example, I had to tap my way down 23rd St. at 6:30 a.m. while simultaneously trying not to step on the dachshund on the 20-foot leash who was pacing me. This is much more harrowing than you can imagine.)

Other things come up quite accidentally.

Take Christmas cards, for instance.

It must've been at least six or seven years ago that I bought the box of cards. Nothing much, just one of those little cheapie boxes of eight or 10 Christmas cards you can pick up at most any drugstore. I'm not sure what prompted me at the time, perhaps the drunken notion that I'd actually be sending some Christmas cards out to people that year. I'm generally not the card-sending type, so I'm not sure what might have given me that idea.

The cards were cute, sure, in a cruel sort of way. They featured a black and white photograph of a kid with his tongue frozen to a flagpole. The message when you opened the card read simply, "Hathy Holidayth."

Yes, mirth based on pain is always the best. I knew kids in Wisconsin who suffered permanent tongue damage as a result of the "frozen flagpole" trick, and I guess that's why I thought they were so funny.

So I brought the cards home and, as expected, didn't mail a single one out. Not that year, nor the year after. Not any year. They pretty much just sat there in their box on the shelf.

Since I first picked them up all those years ago, only one person has received the cards, and that's Dora, the kind old lady who helps me clean my apartment. (Of course, that implies that I'm somehow involved in the cleaning, but I can't honestly say that I am.)

I think Dora started coming by the same year I picked up that box of cards, and so I suspect I left one on the table for her that first Christmas. I've left a card for her every year since.

In fact, Dora has received the same card from me every Christmas for the past six or seven years.

This occurred to me with some horror last week, but when I mentioned it to Morgan, she couldn't stop laughing. She laughed even harder still when it was revealed that I was giving a card with the punchline "hathy holidayth" to a woman who spoke no English, and upon whom the joke would be completely lost.

The only thing that Dora would know for certain is that every year I give her a card featuring a child whose tongue was stuck to a flagpole. No Santa Claus, no wreaths or holly, no candy canes, and certainly no baby Jesus. Nothing at all, really, apart from that lost joke to let her know that it's a pleasant Christmas greeting.

I checked this past weekend, and found that I only had a couple of these cards left. That means that after I give her this year's card, I'm going to have to start looking around for more, to make sure I'm prepared for years to come. I almost feel like I'd be letting her down somehow if I didn't give her that card.