During the slightly self-destructive period of my youth that I’ve come to fondly dub “The Dark Ages,” I spent the majority of the school lunch hour in the library. What’s embarrassing about this – beyond the obvious geeky stigma associated with anything having to do with the library – is that I didn’t have any kind of academic excuse to be there in the first place. I wasn’t doing homework (no, I did this after school at my then best friend, Luke’s house while heating up frozen pizza bagels and listening to Pink Floyd’s epic Dark Side of the Moon...

There are many, many reasons why the holidays are a source of great and profound alarm in me. My friends claim that it might be because I don’t actually have a soul, but being that I’m now the kind of girl who considers it a monumental, impossibly neon sign whenever Johnny Cash’s version of, “If You Could Read My Mind” comes on her iPod at the exact moment she happens to be thinking of that one boy who dedicated it to her all these months ago (true story; look at me, being all gross),  I think I have just cause...

Amongst things like reading three books simultaneously, making the best scrambled eggs in the history of scrambled eggs, and downing a minefield of vodka like it ain’t no thang, I’m also a well-versed expert on teen angst. And I don’t mean, “No, Mom, I don’t want to eat because I’m fat!” angst; we’re talking hardcore, leather jacket-wearing, Slipknot-listening, wall-punching, private property-vandalizing angst. There’s this period of my developmental history that ranges from ages 11 to 14 that I’ve come to fondly dub “The Dark Ages.” During said period, I was the girl with the pink hair and accompanying grimace that,...