I find that anything culturally significant that happened before '93 I associate with the decade before it. In fact, Oregon Trail is one of a handful of signposts that middle school existed at all.

There is one thing you know for sure, one fact that never fails to comfort you: the worst day of your life wasn't in there, in that mess. And it will do you good to remember the best day of your life wasn't in there, either. But another person brought you closer to those borders than you had been, and maybe that's not such a bad thing.

I don't really think of my essays as being about myself. I know it sounds insane, but I just don't think of them as a memoir. They're essays; they're not an autobiography.

Sometimes in New York, you're walking down the street and you realize there's a girl walking in front of you whose thighs you could hit a golf ball through, and maybe that makes you depressed.

I never asked my mother where babies came from but I remember clearly the day she volunteered the information....my mother called me to set the table for dinner. She sat me down in the kitchen, and under the classic caveat of 'loving each other very, very much,' explained that when a man and a woman hug tightly, the man plants a seed in the woman. The seed grows into a baby. Then she sent me to the pantry to get placemats. As a direct result of this conversation, I wouldn't hug my father for two months.

But now my problems had been set loose. They could be anywhere at any time and I was just like everyone else I knew: almost positive that there was something profoundly and undiagnosably wrong with me.

I love to bake, so I made vanilla bean and blueberry muffins for sick hospital children. Just kidding! All of that is true except the sick children part.