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The black sheet.

On a quiet Thursday night a few springs ago, I curled up on the couch in the family room, under a sheet, in front of the TV. After my show ended, I shut it off and shut my eyes. I fell asleep.

Before 5 a.m. on Friday, my brother — who then still lived at home with us — woke up to get ready for work. He rolled out of bed and wandered toward the family room. As was his occasional custom, he intended to spend the first few minutes of his day sleeping some more, but on the couch.

Meanwhile, I still lay sleeping.

All of my body except for my head was buried beneath a black sheet.

On a dark brown couch.

In total darkness.

Too tired to grab his glasses, my brother squinted to see, so he wouldn’t walk into furniture. At the couch, he leaned over it to look for a throw pillow. With his uncorrected eyesight, he saw what he assumed to be one of the peach ones.

But what he actually saw was a really blurry version of my face, which was sound asleep.

Until he grabbed it.

If it is scary to have your face grabbed in your sleep, it is scarier to have your pillow turn out to be a face. We both screamed. Then, I laughed, almost non-stop, for exactly 30 minutes, no exaggeration.

True story.

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This post is part of a series called “True Story.” Click here to read other posts in the series.

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Books in 2012: A Million Little Pieces

It is with pride and joy that I report the following: I just finished my eighth book of 2012.

I’m proud to have finished because a) it’s 432 pages, making it the longest book I’ve read in my entire life and b) as a book exactly zero percent of me wanted to read, finishing it was a feat of strength. I am joyful because having finished it means I am finally free to jump back into the stack of books of I actually want to read.

As I understand it, the book is part memoir, part fiction but was originally marketed as all memoir, which put it and its author, James Frey, at the center of a controversy that heavily involved Oprah. (Long story.) The book, written in the present tense (which is so not my preference for books), is about Frey’s six weeks in a treatment center for drug and alcohol addiction.

As aforementioned, I really didn’t want to read the book. I don’t read fiction. And even if it had turned out that every one of Frey’s words in the book were true, it simply isn’t a book in which I would have much interest. I read it because to do so is part of an assignment for the substance abuse class I’m taking this semester. While I didn’t dislike all of it, there isn’t much to report other than a) Frey dropped too many F-bombs for my taste, b) it does depict what the mind might be like of a person who is dependent on drugs or alcohol and c) the part in which Frey’s friend and fellow treatment center resident Matty uses words like “grasshole” when he’s mad, because he’s trying to stop swearing, is hilarious.

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Click here to read about all the books I read in 2012.

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It’s good to know.

The weather today in the Tampa Bay area is awesome. And so when I technically should have been cooking, I took a few minutes of my afternoon to sit in the backyard with my dog.

Meet Rudy.

My plan to bask in backyard silence was foiled when I realized I was sitting amid a swarm of grasshoppers. 


“Aww, geeze,” I said. Then, I noticed it: a grasshopper sitting on my dog.

Grasshoppers, to my knowledge and in my experience, are harmless. But in the heat of the moment, I projected my irrational fear of them onto my dog. My hunch is that if my dog acted more like he acted in the picture pasted above, I likely would have let him fend for himself. But most days, he acts more like this:

So, with literally zero forethought, the following really happened:

Me: “HEY. GET OFF MY DOG!” [Insert me, flicking a grasshopper off my dog.]

It’s good to know I can do this. And I’m equal parts proud and alarmed to report it. (Proud, because I clearly subconsciously dug deep if I touched a bug on purpose. Alarmed, because it’s the second time in slightly more than a month that I’ve spoken to a bug.)

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Photo of the day.

Today, my brother and I had lunch with my grandparents (all four of them). Afterward, my paternal grandpa, a retired chiropractor, showed me the following:

Yes, that is me. And no, I was not wearing a wig.

My first adjustment, courtesy of my grandpa. Precious. I cherish this picture.