Strange Little Collecting Project

Facebook has become a part of my life. I don’t really like to admit it, but it’s true. I change my status update more frequently than I am proud of, especially considering I am 26 years old and therefore a grown-ass-woman that shouldn’t spend so much time on Facebook. Sometimes I feel like a Jonas-Brother-Loving, dinner-table-texting tweenager because I am so involved with this thing that is Facebook. But I mean really, what is Facebook? Why do I love it so much? Facebook is essentially an acceptable outlet for our basic, narcissistic human nature. You reach a certain age where it becomes tacky and annoying to constantly talk about yourself, but on your Facebook page that’s totally acceptable. In fact it’s expected. Facebook feeds the ego so much, it encourages you to speak in the 3rd person through the status updates, and everybody knows that people who speak in the 3rd person are jerks. And I’m not going to lie. It feels nice to put up a status update that gets a lot of comments. It’...

Today, in the check out line at Barnes and Nobles I sneezed. I knew from conception, at that first little kick in my sinuses, that this was not going to be a small sneeze. This is something that I've dealt with my entire life. I'm a relatively small person, 5'2, one hundred and smee-smee pounds, but every once in a while, maybe two to three times a year, I'll defy scientific possibility and let out a sneeze much bigger than myself. A real fee-fie-foe-fum, celestial body-shifting sneeze. This particular sneeze was going to be just that. I could tell. I tried to convince myself that I didn't need to sneeze. That it was just a false alarm. But I knew I was doomed when I started taking involuntary shallow breaths. So I held onto the books I was going to buy for dear life, spread my feet further apart, and bent my knees for balance. And then it happened. My least favorite part about these sneezes are the silences that always follow. Everyone stops what they are doing to ...