The nursery rhyme ends when a spider comes along and frightens Miss Muffet straight off her tuffet. I have wondered about what kind of lesson this is for a young girl. If you're eating your curds and whey and a spider comes along, I don't think there's anything wrong with picking up a newspaper, smashing it, and going back to your breakfast.

Most people don't get lucky. They get human. They get crushes. This means you irrationally mortgage what little logic you own to pay for this one thing. This relationship is an impulse buy, and you'll figure out if it's worth it later.

In every woman's wardrobe, there are certain accessories that cannot be separated from their back stories.

I attended an extremely small liberal arts school. There were approximately 1,600 of us roaming our New England campus on a good day. My high school was bigger. My freshman year hourly calorie intake was bigger.

Friendship is a Spackle in itself. You'll forgive your friends a lot, and if you're a woman, you'll forgive your straight male friends even more. They represent the possibility of mutual toleration between the sexes, a keyhole into the mind of the Other, and the promise of one day meeting someone just like them except that you want to sleep with them.

Because this is the beauty of strangers: we're all just doing our best to help each other out, motivated not by karma but by a natural instinct to help the greater whole.

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