I have vivid early childhood memories involving the sounds of Abbey Road mixed with the smell of marijuana smoke and the clacking of Scrabble tiles. I also remember watching the old Saturday Night Lives with my parents, and loving Jane Curtain and Gilda Radner but thinking the news part was really boring. When I was eight, I became obsessed with Michael Jackson, and I'm not sure if I ever got the jacket but I DEFINITELY had the glove and I totally wore it to school. That same year I met Doris, and a few years later we got into a huge hippie guitar kick and spent a lot of time playing songs from the 60's late into the night in her parents' kitchen. My life is pretty much exactly the one I envisioned for myself back then, except for some reason I strongly believed that I would live in a log cabin and marry a man who looked like John Denver, and that didn't exactly happen. I wonder what my shrink would say.

I'm kind of an introverted, sensitive Cancer. I think about meaning a lot, why we're here, how the universe works, and what dogs and babies think about. As a result I can be very serious. So I'm lucky to have Doris and Nate around, because with them it somehow all ends up being really funny instead of tragic. My job is to laugh at everything they say.

Strong dark roast coffee brewed in a french press with half and half, dogs, meditation, new notebooks, dusk light, cooking dinner at home, Belgian beer, trees, teddy bears, Greek yogurt, organic vegetable gardening, word games, old hardwood floors, one-on-one conversation, rhyming (especially internal rhyming), old maps, The Weather Channel, yoga, a really good pair of jeans, visionaries and musical suspensions.

That sound that people make after they take a sip of a hot drink that's a combination of a loud exhale and a satisfied grunt, driving more than twelve hours in one day, the concept of "chick lit" or "chick flicks" (what does that even mean except that it contains a female protagonist?). I also dislike the news, especially the authoritative scientific rationalistic tone of the New York Times (although I also read the New York Times pretty much every day).