The Queen of Crafts herself, Martha Stewart, and I have the same birthday. I prefer to think it's the glue-gun wielding, perfect-tart-producing Martha and not the copper pan-throwing, jail-going Martha. But I suppose if I am going to share a calendar square with some of Martha, I have to share it with all of Martha.

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.

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.

My personality, when tasked with creating meals, goes something like this: Is there a way we can make this more difficult? Because let's do that. I don't mean to complicate things. It's just - why buy pre-packaged potato salad when you can spend your morning boiling potatoes and flipping out because there's no dill in the house?

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.

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.

Our culture's obsession with vintage objects has rendered us unable to separate history from nostalgia. People want heart. They want a chaser of emotion with their aesthetics.