• My first bike had a banana seat with the little chrome bar at the back. On the day my dad took off the training wheels, he used the bar as a handle to hold onto the back of my bike while walking behind me. I rode for 20 or 30 feet before he said something and revealed that he had let me go.
• I am addicted to coffee. I may be dependent on caffeine, but I am not driven to consume it in other forms under circumstances when I know it isn't smart.
• I'd like to outfit my cat with a cooling system so when he sits in my lap on warm nights he does not make my legs sweat while calming my nerves, making me feel loved and cleaning my arm with his tongue. I've added this to the list of things I will never have time to do and without which am still perfectly content.
• In middle school, embarrassed about my silly looking fuzzy moustache, I would sneak into my parents' bathroom to shave it off with my dad's electric beard trimmer. I don't even remember the details of how I eventually learned to shave with a proper razor or when my shaving became something not clandestine and weirdly shameful.
• I am a tower of optimism who thinks about death on a regular basis.
• I have flown a kite.
• I was never one of the kids who pretended not to know something because it wasn't cool to be smart. I pretended to know if I didn't and yelled to be heard whether I knew or not. Now I just think it would be cool to be smart.
• My Big Wheel was black, and I often rode it with the plastic seat in the last position even though it was awkward because I wasn't that tall.
• I have an irrational fear of riding public busses. I'm afraid I won't know where my stop is even if I've ridden the same route a thousand times. I don't have this fear about trains.
• I never did tell that kid in my novel writing class that I thought he was a prick. I'm still vaguely annoyed with myself for hanging out with him after class that summer just to be polite.
• Sometimes when I play the guitar I notice my hands working and wonder how they learned to do it. Right after I have that thought I usually fuck up whatever I'm playing.
• I started smoking my freshman year of college. I had long thought it looked cool, and I'd been curious about it for a couple years. The first time I ever got drunk, I smoked a few cigarettes. The next day I bought a pack and started. In all this time I've only switched brands once and briefly.
• Once someone told me you can't die in your own dreams, but I've since done it hundreds of times.
• I believe you can make your own happiness as well as your own unhappiness. I also believe you can be made happy or unhappy without doing it yourself.
• I wish you could have met my dad's dad and my mom's mom. You can still meet my other two grandparents.
• I like Alanis Morrisette. I wish it were ironic that I like her, but it's not.
• I knew a lot of people in college who were upset that their high school experience didn't live up to the hype. Most cited a particularly non-eventful or fiasco-laden prom as the primary example. I never identified with them even though none of the proms I attended were everything they were supposed to be.
• I often wonder if I'd feel like my thoughts were more original had I been born a lot earlier.
• Once I took an old journal and counted the number of times I started entries with variations of "I have nothing to say."
• In third grade, I lied and told my classmates that my parents were divorced because most of the kids I thought were cool had divorced parents.
• I want kids.
• When I was in fourth grade, my mom took me shopping because I badly wanted a pair of parachute pants. When I finally found a pair in my size that seemed like exactly what I had in mind, I tried them on and thought they looked all wrong. I was really upset and decided I didn't want them. I thought my mom was mad cause I'd dragged her to so many stores. I never did own a pair.
• I read somewhere that the romantic poets kept skulls on their desks to remind them of their mortality. I've done it myself for years, but for reasons which are neither as romantic nor as innocent.
• I usually don't mind being told to shut up, but it doesn't always shut me up.
• I only remember two of the phone numbers I no longer call.
• I don't know enough about guns to gauge distance by ear when I hear shots fired, but last night I heard three shots and thought they sounded like they were three blocks from my apartment. Half an hour later I heard sirens, but they sounded five blocks away.
• I wrote a four page short story on a typewriter without a ribbon once. On purpose.

what's on:
"Pigs That Ran Straightaway Into the Water, Triumph Of" (The Mountain Goats - We Shall All Be Healed)