I’m staring my thermostat in the face. He says it’s 65 degrees in the apartment. My extremities say otherwise. We chat.

“Dear sir,” I begin politely, “have you been serviced lately?”

No response.

“Do you know it’s not really 65 in my room? I know because my nose is cold and I’m burrowed under my three blankets and I’m still cold. Why do you only see the hallway, sir, when the world is so much wider than that? The temperature is lower out there in the peripheries.”

He suspects my diction for its mild hints of universalist preaching, which offends his provincial — or plastic — sensibilities.

Forgive me, Cornellians, for you might think that I’ve sinned real bad. Yes, dear friends, “father” and anyone else who cares, my confession is this: my favorite song is the Ave Maria. That is, the Christian prayer calling for the intercession of Mary, mother of Jesus.

But I’m Jewish.

And although this paradox might strike you as weird, it sits just fine with me. Bobby McFerrin once advised an audience, “If you’re Jewish, and you have a problem singing the ‘Ave Maria,’ you can sing the ‘Oy-vey Maria.’” He then laughed at himself, and the audience laughed, and that’s how you know singers are corny.

But, Bobby, I tell you no thanks on the “oy-vey.” The Ave Maria is far too beautiful for that.

Good evening, Cornell, and welcome to the news. I’m your well-dressed anchor, Jeremy, and I’ll be manufacturing truth for you tonight. But folks, I’m not the only one! We’ve got all kinds of actors on the world stage in the past week who have been hard at work shaping truths, shaping opinions and shaping reality with the words they choose to use.

Back in the utter confusion of grade school, they taught us this wonderfully polite acronym for the order of mathematical operations: Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally. I loved calling it PEMDAS, which sounds like some kind of indigestion medicine, although it really stands for Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication, Division, Addition, Subtraction. A polite acronym for a sometimes ruthless belief in the order and ideality of math.

And it is with firm politeness that I beg you, gracious audience: Please Excuse The Following Column About Politics. PETFCAP. And Please Excuse This Horrible Acronym. Because I didn’t plan it out.