I made these feelings puppets for my class, like the idea is to teach toddlers about feelings, so they’ll say “I’m angry!” instead of hitting another child with a shovel. I’m not sure this ever actually works, but we’re supposed to try. So I made three puppets and assigned each puppet an emotion, and then I named the puppets after my parents and my brother. That's why my job is amazing.

I don’t wish to over-stress the point about what a visually unobservant moron I am, but I’ve lived in my apartment for three months now, and I only just realized that my bedroom has a different heating dial than my living room. I guess this is my brother’s point about how I don’t think like a person. A person would think, Gee. It’s much colder in my bedroom than my living room. There must be two different heating systems operating these two rooms. I should investigate further. I was just sad it was so cold in my bedroom.

I have to sing fairly often at work, and I really, really don’t sing well. Most of the time, no one seems to notice or care, but every once in a while I’ll be singing to my toddlers, and they’ll look at me with expressions that can only be described as dismayed.

I learned last week that most Thanksgiving songs for children are about the imminent death of turkeys. The imminent, terrified death. It’s one thing to be like, I’m going to kill this turkey, because this turkey has no consciousness. It’s another thing to give the turkey consciousness, and be like, Run away, Mr. Turkey, or you will be a mouthful on Thanksgiving day, and then still kill it.

Sometimes my cat and I will rise from our respective perches at the same time, and head in the same direction, and there will be like two seconds when we’re walking next to each other, and then she starts to sprint. It’s like we’re suddenly competing for something, but I have no idea what that thing could be. It’s not food.

I feel like my appropriate bus behavior is steadily declining. I used to sit on the bus and just read or listen to my iPod or look at the mountains. Then I started eating breakfast on the bus. Then I started putting on makeup. This morning I finished getting dressed. I feel like that might have crossed a line.

There’s this recent study about how people talking on cell phones don’t see clowns riding on unicycles, and it’s supposed to prove that talking on cell phones is super distracting. I’m sure it is. But I think the researchers should consider the possibility that some people just aren’t visually observant. Yesterday a friend and I walked by a piano in someone’s front yard, and my friend said, “That’s weird,” and I said, “What is?” This happens a lot. It took me three years to notice my parents painted their house yellow. I notice things that are, like, in my way, but an entire team of seven-foot clowns could ride an entire fleet of rainbow-colored unicycles by me, and if none of them crossed my path, I’d never notice.

I have to use quarters to do laundry. So I often go to the bank to get a roll of quarters. It took me an ENTIRE YEAR AND A HALF to realize I could go to ANY bank to get a roll of quarters, instead of scheduling my entire life around going to MY bank, like I was using my ATM card to get a roll of quarters, WHICH I WAS NOT. I was just using a $10 bill, which is accepted as legal tender in ALL BANKS, regardless of whether I have an ACCOUNT THERE. A year and a half.

Sometimes I get bored at work and instead of talking about how it’s fall and the leaves are changing and this car is red and that car is blue and we sit in chairs when we eat, I start talking about football or novels or cooking. When I do this, the toddlers listen, with this quizzical expression on their faces, and after a monologue about how I’m not sure if I have almond extract at home, they smile and say, “Extract!” I’ve decided that counts as education.

Occasionally I have to wait for the bus in the rainy cold night. Not all bus stops are well-lit. This raises the problem of monsters, obviously, but I can usually combat that by talking on my phone – the monsters, you know, won’t want to interrupt my conversation. The larger problem is that the bus will drive right by me. To avoid this, I hurl myself into the street, actively deciding that it’s better to be HIT by a bus than to MISS one.

I volunteer at this store, and I was closing this afternoon for the first time, which entails counting all the cash in the register. We were fifteen dollars short, and my co-worker and I were trying to figure out what happened when he said, “You counted the change, right?” I . . . had not.

Sometimes while I'm watching a baseball game, I’ll forget I paused or rewound my DVR, at some earlier point, and the score on my computer will be ahead of the score on my television, and my first thought is always that I’ve somehow entered the future through my computer. Even though I do this fairly often, and my computer is not generally capable of bypassing the mechanics of the universe.

People are always saying this to me about the cleanliness of their homes: “I don’t mind when things are messy, I mind when they’re dirty.” The consensus appears to be that clutter is okay, but soap scum is not. This makes me nervous, because I hate clutter, but I also hate cleaning my shower. I, in fact, do not ever clean my shower, which means I have a tidy, dirty home, and that’s apparently the wrong team.

Because I’m a girl, I feel like I can only say legitimate, baseball-y things about baseball. Like, I can have conversations about Ryan Braun’s VORP, but not about how much more attractive Ryan Braun is than other humans. Here’s the thing, though: I’ve always loathed the Rockies, and I think it’s because of their uniforms. Their uniforms are from hell. The black and purple thing alone is a nightmare, and then they sometimes wear those caps with one color on the head-covering part and a different color on the bill, which is the worst, most terrible look in the entire world. Just thinking about it makes me angry. I want the entire team to get eaten by bears.

I have a friend who’s obsessed with the fact that Ted Bundy tricked people into becoming murder victims by wearing an arm or leg cast and asking women to help him move something into his car. My friend is always like, THAT WOULD SO WORK. I don’t think it would work on me, because I’m a big fan of completely ignoring anything strangers say to me – unless that person is asking me questions about bus routes. I don’t know if it’s possible to get someone into a car by asking her questions about bus routes, but if it is, I’m in trouble.

I use the same tone of voice when talking to my cat as I do when talking to my toddlers, and sometimes after all day with the toddlers, I come home and say things like this to my cat: “Do you want the toy bird? Do you want the green toy bird? Show me something else green.”

I walk pretty fast (like, professional athlete-caliber fast), and so I’m often speeding up behind people in front of me on the sidewalk. When this happens at night, the person always does that over-the-shoulder sneak look, to make sure I’m not a criminal or a vampire. (Because you can tell this with one glance.) Even giant dudes do this. Even when there are three of them. Nobody likes being followed.

I am a really terrible team player, and also a really poor sport. So I was never that into organized athletics. I have no idea how good at sports I am – not very, probably, but who can say? I’ve never been tested, and since I’m female, there are sports I’m not even allowed to play. This has the unexpected benefit of giving me a totally deluded sense of my own athletic ability: I can watch a football game and honestly think, I could definitely do that.

One of the toddlers in my school puts on dress-up clothes immediately when she enters her classroom, but she doesn’t ever play a game related to the clothing. She just puts on a giant pink frothy gown and sits down to play with blocks. That's what I like about children: They’re insane.

In The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury describes, taking place in 1999 (but written in 1950), “housewives lumbering like great black bears in their furs along the icy streets.” This world has space travel and alien beings, but people still use the word “housewife” and wear fur. FUR. Nobody wears fur! Even people who eat meat three times a day and own twenty-seven pairs of leather shoes are like, FUR, my god. Anyway: I think it’s funny how cultural changes are impossible to see coming. Not that Bradbury was right about the aliens. SO FAR.

I was watching the US Open on Tuesday, and I got confused about Rafael Nadal’s nickname. At first I thought his nickname was the Minotaur, but then I thought maybe his nickname was just something bull-related, and for some reason my first association with bulls is the Minotaur. Which is not surprisingly, actually, as I have almost no idea what a bull is, like, it’s a cow? I have a sort of animal recognition disorder; I play this game with my toddlers. I’ll hold up a horse and say, “This is a hippopotamus, right?” The toddlers will say, “No! It’s a horse!” That’s how we make learning fun. Only sometimes I’ll hold up what I think is a horse, pretend it’s a hippopotamus, and it turns out to be a moose.

I was in a drugstore yesterday and the boy in front of me in line was shirtless – but he was BUYING shirts, a three-pack of those Hanes underwear T-shirts. Here are my questions: Does the fact that he was purchasing shirts negate the “no shirt, no shoes, no service” rule? He began opening the package as soon as the cashier handed it back to him, after ringing it up, so maybe the fact that he was only shirtless for PART of the time he was in the store makes it okay. More importantly, WHAT could possibly have happened? He couldn’t just have spilled something on the shirt, or ripped it in some way – in that situation I have to imagine he would keep the shirt on while buying new shirts. The shirt he was wearing must have been DESTROYED in some fashion, and destroyed while he was far enough away from home that going home and getting a new shirt wasn’t an option. He clearly needed a shirt immediately, thus the new shirt purchases: if he was just wandering around shirtless, why enter the drugstore and buy shirts? He must have been wearing a shirt and then it somehow became UNWEARABLE, but whatever happened wasn’t traumatizing enough to make him go home. He was ready for more shirt-destroying action.

The fact that I cannot keep myself from listening to my iPod at a level that is without a doubt DEVASTATING my hearing helps me understand people who keep smoking. Sometimes I make it halfway to the bus stop – the bus stop across the street from my apartment – without turning my iPod all the way up. Sometimes I actually make it onto the bus.

Sometimes when I’m walking through a parking lot, I’ll pass a giant truck, and I catch myself thinking that if the truck were to suddenly roll towards me, I could stop it. Not duck out of the way. Stop it. With my super-strength, I guess. I’m afraid that’s how I’d actually react in an emergency – as if I possess superpowers.

I like how watching television online has tricked me into watching commercials again.

It embarrasses me when I go to the grocery store and some item I’m buying doesn’t ring up, and the cashier asks me how much it is, and if my life depended on it, I couldn’t tell her. I can’t even give her a ballpark number. I would pay anywhere between $1 and $20 for hummus. I have no idea. I’m not like this with anything else – I know how much soap and jeans and computers cost. I think I already feel so guilty as soon as I enter a grocery store – between trying to eat locally and healthfully and mindfully ALL AT ONCE, which is DIFFICULT – that I’m unwilling to also make myself feel guilty for the amount of money I spend, or I might have to start conducting my grocery shopping while weeping.

I have this theory that famous people say insane things because they’ve actually forgotten what sounds relatable. They just have no conception of how their words are coming across – like when professional athletes talk about their contracts. Instead of saying, reasonably, “I’m going to try to make as much money as I can, because I don’t know how long my career will last, and hey, everyone loves money,” they say things like, “I need to take care of my family.” I think they’re trying to couch it in relatable terms; they’re trying to say, “I’m a normal guy! My concerns are your concerns!” But it comes off like, “I’m sorry, I’m going to need MILLIONS OF DOLLARS to prevent my family from starving to death.”

I work with a fair number of people who aren’t native English speakers, and it’s made me realize how absurd my own speech is. Like when I was walking downstairs with a group of children, and they were moving really, really slowly, I said, “You guys are not exactly overwhelming me with your ability to move quickly.” My co-worker gave me a confused look, and I said, “Um, the sentence structure of that was probably unnecessarily complicated.” Which in itself – possibly I should stop using adverbs.

This is the kind of conversation I have in my head. I’ll be cleaning out my closet, and I’ll think, “You should probably get rid of that dress.” And then I’ll think, “I agree.” Here’s my question: Who the hell am I agreeing with? Do other people do this? Sometimes I catch myself having conversations like, “I don’t think it’s the soap that’s the problem.” “I don’t either, to be honest.” That is DEMENTED. Like, I don't "either?" I don't REALLY think I'm an insane person, but I clearly seem to have two different viewpoints all the time. Or, rather, the same viewpoint from two sources. That's actually crazier. Damn.

My problem with most movies and television shows is that they don’t require me to suspend my disbelief enough. I am willing to go along for the ride if there are vampires or werewolves or ghosts involved, but not immigration officers who fly from Manhattan to Alaska to force a couple to admit their potential marriage is a sham. (I just saw The Proposal.) I realize this shows a basic misunderstanding of comedy on my part: there’s no entertainment if people just act the way they usually do; the joke is that this immigration officer is crazy. But for some reason, I find the idea of an immigration officer ACTUALLY ATTENDING THE WEDDING more unrealistically distracting than, say, aliens that are giant robots or maybe cars and also happen to speak English.

I’m currently obsessed with the fact that nobody else at my gym ever asks the employees to change the television channels. Our cardio machines don’t have individual TVs in them; there’s just a row above the machines, and yesterday I went to the gym, and two of the channels were on NBC, which was showing a children’s cartoon, and I knew it was on NBC because Wimbledon was on earlier that morning, but that was FIVE HOURS earlier. And who decides to put two of them on the same channel? That’s insane. I guess it’s possible I’m the only person at my gym who watches TV, except that I’m always going around asking the employees to change the channel, and when I ask the other gym-goers if they mind, they’re always like, Yes, please, change it to CNN, I would rather not be watching My Friend Rabbit.

Someone once told me that when, say, Person A calls Person B stubborn, that just means that Person B refuses to do what Person A wants. I think that’s fair enough, but I also think that when I make my eighty-seven year-old grandmother walk fifty extra feet to a mall entrance, because I refuse to enter malls through department stores, or I insist on a seven-year-old admitting he was wrong (and I was right) about the rules of a particular board game before I continue to play with him, it wouldn’t be. . . unjust to characterize me as stubborn.

I always forget how much I hate memoirs until I read one and think, Oh my god, enough about you.

One of the best things about not living with my parents is that my father doesn’t have to see how often I almost put my hand down a still-running garbage disposal. I did this three times last week. I think in my eagerness to push the cucumber peels down the drain, I forget the method by which they’re disposed.

During a discussion that wandered variously between baseball, probability, and murder, my roommate and I realized that I’m more likely to date a professional baseball player – and a GOOD one – than be murdered by a serial killer. This is an enormous comfort to me.

I think I’m only afraid of those little sprouts that grow on potatoes because the sprouts are called "eyes."

Sometimes I just want to drink a lot of ginger ale. Like, a lot.

Last summer I managed to figure out a way to politely but honestly answer the “weakness” part of the question “What are your greatest strengths and weaknesses?” Now when I exhibit those weaknesses at work, I always think, At least I warned them.

I was shopping the other day, and I found a dress that sort of looked like a bedshirt, the kind of thing men in movies about the Revolutionary War are always wearing when they wake up in the middle of the night and light candles and find out that the British are coming. But it was also kind of cute (if that’s in any way imaginable), and I decided to try it on, and it was kind of cute, but I still thought it might be an actual NIGHTGOWN. A nightdress. I thought of looking online and making sure it was indeed intended to be a modern woman's garment, but then I decided it’s probably best not to wear a dress that resembles an eighteenth-century patriot’s pajamas – even if it’s not intended as such.

At work last week, a parent came into my school and handed me a colored pencil she said she found in the parking lot. I feel like this is the most baffling thing that has ever happened to me. The only plausible explanation I can come up with – for why ANYONE would EVER do that – is that she thought colored pencils and schools were like hypodermic needles and hospitals: The colored pencil needed to be disposed of in our special designated trash.

Here’s the problem with shopping at a farmer’s market: I don’t have that kind of patience. Every Sunday, there’s this farmer’s market about seven steps from my apartment, and I go there every Sunday with the best of intentions, and make this loop around the whole thing. And NEVER buy ANYTHING. Because I’d have to make five different stops and have five different conversations and get my wallet out five different times to get what I want. So every Sunday I just give up and go to the supermarket, where I can find pineapple and marzipan and vinegar and pay with a credit card and not have any conversations at all.

Sometimes when I complain about the bus, the person I’m talking to will say, "You know, you could always get a bike." To which I respond, "Um, I’m an adult?" On the long list of reasons it’s better to be an adult than a child, not having to use a bicycle as a method of transportation ranks somewhere between being able to use a calculator whenever I want and never needing permission to use the bathroom.

I read an article yesterday about a woman who kept all of her trash for three months, and carried it around with her, to teach herself about sustainability. It stressed me out. It was like when I read The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle in the same week, and couldn’t buy out-of-season produce for at least four days. I still feel shame palpitations whenever I buy non-local raspberries – which is often. But if raspberries are AVAILABLE in February – what am I supposed to do? Raspberries are amazing. Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver both claim that out-of-season produce tastes terrible, but that just makes them liars.

When my bus is more than five minutes late, I turn my iPod off, close my book, and stand up. I face the correct direction. It's not that I think I can will the bus to arrive, just that I want the bus to know I'm serious now.

I went to the Whole Foods in Salt Lake City last weekend, and the friend I was with asked me if they had good vegan stuff. And I replied, “Well, it’s no Seattle Whole Foods.” So apparently I’ve now become a West Coast snob, in addition to already being an East Coast snob. Like, why are all you people so friendly and why aren’t there more vegan options? Why aren’t you driving more aggressively and why doesn’t your city collect compost? Why are you making eye contact with me and where are your bike lanes?

Sometimes I feel like I’m wasting my life, as people my age tend to do, and then I think about how good I’ve become at riding the bus: There is not a Seattle bus idiosyncrasy I couldn’t tell you. I’ve gone from a girl who, the day after I moved to Seattle, paid $5 for one bus ride (you can’t get change from the bus driver; I guess this is something people know) to a girl who rolls her eyes when people ask for the back door on route 44 to be opened after 7 PM. That’s completely worth a year of my life.

One of the reasons children are so hilarious is that they say what they’re thinking. Everyone has a story about a child asking a non-pregnant woman (or more amusingly and possibly less offensively, a man) if she has a baby in her tummy. I once heard a child ask a teenage boy why he always looked like he had chicken pox on his face. Because what they say is often true (they’re not asking thin people if they have babies in their tummies), I sometimes fall into an “out of the mouths of babes and fools” trance, and feel like the children are witnessing to me some kind of truth only they can see. An eight-year-old tells me I’m wearing too much makeup, and I think, Oh, my god, oh no!, and rush to the bathroom to inspect my face. But then I remember: Why am I taking makeup advice from an eight-year-old?

This is the Aesop’s fable about the expression “sour grapes”: A fox walked by and saw some juicy grapes hanging from a tree. He tried to jump up and snatch them, but he couldn’t reach. So he walked away and said, “They were probably sour anyway.” My dream in life is to ask someone for grapes, be told there are none, and respond, “They were probably sour anyway.” This morning, I saw water roll off a duck’s back. It rolled RIGHT OFF. I love that. I once saw someone throw a paper airplane and hit someone else in the eye, and I was like, "Oh, my god, you almost put his eye out!"

I don’t understand the perception that dogs are cooler pets than cats. Dogs are needy and affectionate; cats are aloof and uninterested. Dogs are domesticated wolves; cats are domesticated lions. (Sort of. Ish.) That’s not even a contest. One of those species is known for raising human babies with its own young, and the other for RULING THE JUNGLE.