The problem with not having anybody to tell you what to do, I understood, is that there was nobody to tell you what not to do.

I was learning that if I lived slightly in the future-what will happen next-I didn't have to feel so much about what was going on in the present.

If I were a serial killer, I would not be the kind that stabs and then eats the victim. I would be the kind that hides in a tree and shoots at the aerobics class.

I saw a monkey walking on a leash and thought it was an ugly foreign child.

But my favorite band is Curbside Life, out of Chicago.

Even when we lose an arm or a leg, there's not less of us but more. Human experience weighs more than human tissue.

So that's what I'm here to become. And suddenly, this word fills me with a brand of sadness I haven't felt since childhood. The kind of sadness you feel at the end of summer. When the fireflies are gone, the ponds have dried up and the plants are wilted, weary from being so green.