One of my goals for the Christmas vacation---ie: the ten days in December I spent at my parents' house in San Diego, eating cheese just as quickly as my mother could buy it---was to teach myself iMovie.

Goals! On vacation! I know! What is the world coming to? But man cannot live by back issues of Us Weekly alone, turns out, even when those back issues of Us Weekly are substituted with HGTV marathons and late morning lie-ins, and so eventually, when slothfulness had lost its charm, I decided to tackle my Christmas vacation goal and make iMovie my bitch.

I think we can all admit to a slightly embarrasing celebrity crush, can't we? Mine, for example, is Justin Bobby. Are you familiar with Justin Bobby? He's the resident "bad boy" on The Hills, and I put "bad boy" in quotes like that because pah! He rides a motorcycle! He often has a bit of stubble! Sometimes he forgets to show up at parties! He's not strangling kittens or handing out roofies, is what I'm saying: he basically just wears a leather jacket and chews gum. He's the best kind of bad boy: the fairly harmless kind who favors plaid.

Oh man, really? I have to spell it out for you?

Internet, not since I made the mistake of starting my first day of boarding school by hanging a life-sized poster of Chesney Hawkes above the bed in my dormitory---therefore cementing my reputation as "the girl who hung a life-sized poster of Chesney Hawkes above her bed on the first day" for the next seven years of my life, all the way from age 11 to age 18---have I faced so much open ridicule over a professed love interest. 

I should probably tell you right now that this story is going to be a little bit gross. If you have eyes, and I assume you do, the odds are fairly high that you are going to squinch them shut quite suddenly while reading it, not unlike a man who flinches and subconsciously reaches protectively for his testicles whenever he stumbles across the word "castration." This story has to do with eyes you see, my eyes in particular, and people have sort of a thing about eyes.

I have decided that I cannot possibly go to the cinema anymore. When you go to the cinema, you see, you are entirely too dependent on the people around you to be reasonable and sane. Most people in the cinema are reasonable and sane, of course, but every now and then you get one bird-brained knucklehead who breaks the social contract---the social contract of, you know public sanity and reasonableness---and ends up ruining it for the rest of us.

I'm not sure why I was thinking about this, except to say that I think about all manner of weird things when I'm trying to get to sleep at night---like how I'd decorate other people's houses if I lived in them (probably with more red)---but the other day I found myself thinking about the three things I always need to have in my refrigerator.

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.

Look, I never said my Best Things Ever were going to be interesting and fancy, alright? But I was in the checkout line at Target yesterday---trying to cheer myself up after dropping my mother off at the airport by buying that new mascara that claims it makes your lashes grow (I'll keep you posted on that one)---when I spotted a new flavor of gum.

Friends, I have found the chink in my armor. It's not that I can't do a cartwheel or burp on command or count to five on my fingers without inadvertently putting the pinkie before the ring finger EVERY SINGLE TIME, none of which I have ever been able to do. No, the chink in my armor is that I cannot make homemade pizza. I have failed miserably at making homemade pizza on every occasion that I've tried it, tonight being no exception.

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."

So there I was, with a blog post all written in my head already about my haaaaaiiiiiiiirrrrrrrr---you know, the sort of self-absorbed little nugget that some social media professor at a third-rate university would hold up as Exhibit A in a lecture entitled Why Bloggers Are Navel-Gazing Twerps Who Assume You Give A Crap About Their Bangs---when J.D. Salinger died on Thursday morning.

I turn thirty a week from today and I am not afraid to tell you that I have been sucker-punched by that old cliche, big time. You know the cliche I'm talking about: the one where you dread turning thirty. Every prime-time sitcom in the history of the world has made rampant use of this cliche at one time or another, and apparently I have watched enough prime-time sitcoms that I've fallen for it, hook, line, and sinker. I have been dreading my thirtieth birthday since the day after my twenty-ninth. I mean, that's what you're supposed to do, right?