Ladies. Large masses of girls are often prone to this salutation. I hate being mollified with this unsolicited "ladies" business. I know we're all women. I am conscious of my breasts. Do I have to be conscious of yours as well? Do men do this? Do they go, "Men: Meet for ribs in the shed after the game. Keg beer, raw eggs, and death metal only." I would imagine not.

A human being can spend only so much time outside her comfort zone before she realizes she is still tethered to it.

Picture it in your mind's nostril: you get in a cab in time to catch twin thugs named Vomit and Cologne assaulting a defenseless pine-tree air freshener.

New Yorkers have a delightfully narcissistic habit of assuming that if they're not conscious of a scene, it doesn't exist.

Some of the writers I admire who seem very, very funny and very emotional to me can develop a closeness with the reader without giving too much of themselves away. Lorrie Moore comes to mind, as does David Sedaris. When they write, the reader thinks that they're being trusted as a friend.

For the average person, taken to their sick bed, it takes a serious bout of pneumonia or a full body cast to completely forget the life they had prior to falling off the rollercoaster. I, however, will do this over a paper cut on my thumb, obsessing of said cut and being generally consumed by it.

I wanted to be an archaeologist. But in school you have to take a tremendous amount of statistics for that, and I am not good at statistics. So I hit a real wall with archaeology. It's probably like wanting to be an architect - you think it's all fun and games, and then you have to get out a calculator and you're done.