The Secret

The Secret, a self-empowerment book that's being flung about in book circles and touted as nothing short of miraculous, was gifted to me. Not to be left out of a trend, I've been trying out some of the suggestions. One passage suggests that, before sleep, I replay all the events of the day and, "If any events or moments did not got the way you wanted, replay them in your mind in a way that thrills you." Here are some events from my day that I thought might could use a rewrite:
1. In an effort to get through a restaurant meal with a tired 4-year old, I would not have succumbed to the hot judgment of the woman at the adjacent table and her three silent children and, when my daughter refused to stop dancing in the aisle and eat her damn burrito, I might have given her a little pat on the head, rather than dragging her into the bathroom and threatening to burn all of her toys.
2. During a Rockwellian moment of drinking coffee and humoring my mother by reading aloud from Robert Pinsky's America's Favorite Poems, I would not have taken her bait and entered in a heated argument about home decor. In this conflict, I implied that the four paintings she demanded I hang in the living room were painted by a no-name ass clown and would serve the decor best if they were mounted in the following locations: beneath the litter box, in one of the toilet tanks, on the ceiling of the guest bathroom, and on the topmost branch of the tree in the backyard, respectively. I haven't thought of an alternate ending for this one.