“This is hurting me a lot more than it’s hurting you,” he said. It was his standard line, but I knew that this time he was right. Worse than the boil was the stuff that came out of it. What got to me, and got to him even worse, was the stench, which was unbearable, and unlike anything I had come across before. It was, I thought, what evil must smell like - not an evil person but the wicked ideas that have made him that way. How could a person continue to live with something so rotten inside? And so much of it!

But instead I am applying for a job as an elf. Even worse than applying is the very real possibility that I will not be hired, that I couldn't even find work as an elf. That's when you know you're a failure.

I was just struggling with my inner vachette and pondering the depths of my own inhumanity.

Now, I like a church service, but this was one of those write-your-own-vows sorts of things. Neither of them had ever picked up a pen in their life, but all of a sudden they’re poets, right, like that’s all it takes — being in love.

I'm friends with a lot of writers and so many of them say how much they hate signings and how they leave after a certain period of time. But what is so hard about sitting there while people tell you how much they love you? And if you don't like it, well, learn to like it. I try to take one person at a time. I never look down the line to see how many more people are left. And I always try to make people talk about something besides whatever they planned to say.

I attributed their behavior to the fact that they didn't have a TV, but television didn't teach you everything. Asking for candy on Halloween was called trick-or-treating, but asking for candy on November first was called begging, and it made people uncomfortable. This was one of the things you were supposed to learn simply by being alive, and it angered me that the Tomkeys did not understand it.

When I look at a lot of older stuff that I've written, I think one sign of amateur humor writing is when you see people trying too hard.