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.

The search for one's first professional job is not unlike a magical love potion: when one wants to fall in love with the next thing one sees, one generally does.

There's an 'Everything must go!' emotional liquidation feel to the end of your twenties, isn't there? What will happen if we turn thirty and we're not 'ready?' You don't feel entirely settled in any aspect of your life, even if you are on paper.

We've come to expect so little from online privacy measures that public displays of concern about the matter are more or less for show. Being devastated to discover you've been tagged in somebody else's photo has an air of the melodramatic about it at this point.

At the end of each year, I sit on the floor and go page by page through the old calendar, inking annual events into the new one, all the while watching my year in 'dinner withs' skate by. When I'm done, I save the old calendar in the box of the new one and put it with the others on a shelf.

Time grabs you by the scruff of your neck and drags you forward. You get over it, of course. Everyone was right about that. One mathematically insignificant day, you stop hoping for happiness and become actually happy.

You can't possibly fathom the ins and outs of a prepubescent beauty treatment until you've felt the strange but exhilarating tingle of a cottage-cheese-and-Pop-Rocks facial.