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.