“I’ve bought you something,” she said. She looked excited, like a puppy eager to please.

“Oh really? What could that be? A season ticket to the opera, or a year’s supply of anti-depressants?” he said and shut the front door.

“Ow,” said the door. “Not so hard.”

“You’ll like it, I think,” she said. Her tongue was hanging out and she’d cocked her head to one side so that her ear flopped in a cute way over her left eye. “It’s to help your recovery. Come through.”

She led him into the sitting room.

“It’s an aquarium,” he said. “It’s just what I’ve always wanted. Is there a sunken ship?”

I just want to go on record as saying the following: Christmas dinner should not be Thanksgiving dinner’s doppelganger. Shake things up a bit. My family, for example, has a spaghetti and lasagna feast. My neighbors roast a bear. A close friend of mine cooks up a big ol’ swarm of bees. And Winslow hollows out a turkey and makes his world famous clown stuffing, complete with rubber noses, balloons, tiny pies, and, somewhere toward the end of the meal, a car filled with several dozen more clowns.

I first felt pure hatred in kindergarten, when I met a boy named Travis. He was humanlike in appearance, jelly-stained and sticky like the rest of us, but in reality he was a putrid beast, crafted out of pure malevolence and hellfire. He probably hated me for the same reasons most people did—because I was the annoying little chunker with big glasses and blunt-cut bangs—but I’d like to think that he was just intimidated, acting out of fear. That, perhaps, behind my huge glasses were eyes so full of wisdom and truth that it pained him to be in the same room as me. Maybe he knew that I was destined for greatness, and despised me for it. Maybe he had never encountered such an electric energy before. Either that or my stupid haircut.

Every once in a while, Eileen and Andrew knock me on the shoulder with their billy-club of friendship and say, “You’re up!”, and I fire up the world’s worst video-editing software, Abridge some Classics, and mortify the English professors who only ever tried to make me appreciate literature. Obviously, I am not here to tell

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Missing socks are a fact of life in my house, and when I’m not blaming cats or faeries or the tiny 18th century Spaniard that lives in my foyer closet, I suspect many of the socks sneak off in the dead of night to have torrid affairs with one another. This also explains the amount of baby socks I find around the house that I can’t recall either of my children ever wearing. This is sock biology at its finest.