ONE

It is roughly 1990. We are living in Hong Kong. My mother wakes up in the middle of the night to nurse my baby brother and sister, as people with recently born infants often do. She is sitting up in bed, in the dark. She is breastfeeding Luke. She feels a weird....feeling on her left shoulder, just below her collarbone. It's like something is brushing up against her skin. Oh, she thinks, it's my necklace. Then: wait, she thinks. I'm not wearing a necklace. She puts her hand to her neck and cups it around an enormous cockroach. She screams bloody murder. She turns the light on. The cockroach is at least four inches long. My dad runs in, certain she is being decapitated or garotted or something equally as gruesome. "COCKROACH!" she shouts. "Oh, thank god," says my dad. "I thought there was something wrong with the baby."

My mother has been here in San Francisco all week, house-sitting my friend's house and also dog-sitting my friend's very lovable chihuahua. I'm not really much of a dog person normally, although I have found myself making a definite exception for this chihuahua, mostly because he acts more like a cat than a dog---small, cuddly, quiet, doesn't smell dog-ish---and also because he has a very impressive collection of sweaters. It's like Paris Fashion Week, visiting my mother after work; every time, the chihuahua is wearing a different outfit.

I would like to begin this post by announcing something that has just occured to me: by the end of today, I will have eaten cheese for all three meals. I had cream cheese on my bagel this morning, and a hefty selection of leftover Christmas Eve cheese and crackers for lunch.

How old were you when you took your driving test? Sixteen, maybe? Seventeen or eighteen? My brother Tom took his yesterday. He's turning 27 in three months.

Luckily, he passed---can you imagine the humiliation of failing your driving test at 26, after you've been learning (on and off) for ten years? Way worse than failing at sixteen because you drove through a stop sign. Yeah, whatever, I drove through a stop sign the first time I took my driving test, don't make a big deal of it or anything. Come on! It was really hard to see where the line was!

Before I tell you about my Christmas, which was excellent, I am going to tell you about my day after Christmas, which---if we are being authentic---I would call Boxing Day, for this is what English people call the day after Christmas, did you know that? I could be responsible and look it up on Wikipedia for you but instead I'm just going tell you that I think it has something to do with boxing up all the food you didn't eat on Christmas Day and giving it to the poor people....or, hmm, something like that. Yeah, you'd better just look it up on Wikipedia, I'm probably wrong.

This is Charlie and Sadie wishing you a Happy Christmas, and if you don't celebrate Christmas, they're wishing you a really kickass Friday. Charlie is wearing his handsome green and red striped holiday sweater---very big for 2010, according to his sources in Paris---and Sadie is wearing what her embarrassing mother and father cloyingly refer to as her "pretty pretty Christmas dress."

I have come to a crossroads regarding my hair. Yes, I know that sort of scintillating opener is what makes my blog my blog and not, say, a cracking page turner on the New York Times bestseller list, but if you can't indulge in a little navel-gazing on your own website, where can you indulge in it, you know? 

Every morning when I wake up---and, let's be honest, several times throughout the day, too---I check two things: the condition of my skin and the weather report. Ideal state of affairs: no blemishes and plenty of sunshine.

This is a picture of my Christening, where my parents look approximately twelve. (They weren't, of course, they were more like 29, but don't they look startlingly young?) My mother sent this to me the other day, not for the comic relief of me looking like a bald deer in headlights, nor for the hilarious glimpse of my grandma, peering through the gap between my parents while looking like she's searching for a dropped contact lens. 

In my parents' new house in San Diego, there is a bathroom without a door. Well, that's not strictly true, I suppose; there is a sort of archway dividing it from the bedroom. But if someone walked into that bedroom while you were in the bathroom, well, hoo boy, you'd get to know each other pretty quickly. If they were at the sink or in the bath, you'd definitely see them. If they were standing in the shower? Then you'd see a whole lot of them.