Dear Erica with a C, I hope this letter finds you well. I would have sent it to you directly, but you seem to have refused my Facebook and Twitter adds. That’s fine. I understand your reticence completely — I usually don’t add strangers, either! I’m sorry if I creeped you out. I’m sorry if this letter creeps you out. It’s just a gag, obviously. Mostly.
It is 9pm. It is 9pm, and I’m jogging through a graveyard in the middle of New Hampshire. It is 9pm, and I am optimizing my time by using this time to think about what I will do tomorrow to optimize that time. I decide I will wake up at 4am. I will wake up at 4am, and that will not be a problem because I will be starving (having dreamt of nothing but peanut butter and pork roast). So, […]
“I cannot believe,” I announce to my mother and father from the back seat of the car, “that there will be a live donkey at church today.” We are driving to the small Quaker meetinghouse my family has attended for nearly two decades. When I was a child, I was a wise man in the pageant for three years running. I wore a maroon choir robe, a paper crown, and a garland of crumbled tinsel, saved and reused like it really […]
It’s December. A cab driver picks me up on my way home from a friend’s Christmas party. The driver of Yellow Cab medallion number 4520 spends the next several miles trying to coerce me to sleep with him after his shift ends at midnight, in just 20 minutes. I tell him no and change the subject, again and again. He persists. A sign in front of the passenger seat tells me his cab number and directs passengers to report incidents […]
The thing about scientific experiments is that you have to follow directions. You have to know the terminology and pay attention to detail. You have to pay attention. I don’t understand much about how to do the experiments in this class because I am not paying attention. I don’t really know that I am not paying attention, though, because I look right at the teacher when he’s talking, which is what you do when you’re paying attention, but it’s like […]
I wasn’t supposed to be in California that summer. I’m the kind of person who immediately forgets all plans I don’t write down. By my junior year of college I had come to rely on a day planner to keep track of every important date. Birthdays, travel plans, summer program application deadlines—the little blue booklet organized them all. The scribbles inside it were especially important to me during my spring semester abroad in Paris. I was thousands of miles away […]
For one summer when I was sixteen years old, I worked at Great America, in a game booth called “The Amazing Alfredo.” You’d give me one dollar and I’d guess your age or weight within three years or three pounds. You’d write one of these numbers down on a slip of paper and hand it back to the Six Flags employee to your right, who is stoned. His name is Chip. Think of Chip as your arbitration counselor and this […]
