Strange Little Collecting Project

It’s amazing to think about all the lies we’re told as children, and it’s even more amazing how willingly and thoroughly we believe these lies. I don’t mean this in a cynical way; it’s just the way it is. My brother who I idolized for most of my childhood was notorious for feeding me lies for his own amusement, and I was notorious (still am actually) for believing him without a doubt. I was told that bees wouldn’t sting if your body temperature was lower than normal, a claim that caused me to stick my hand out of a car window in chilly October air for twenty minutes. I also have this lie to thank for a very embarrassing moment in my college biology study group. I bought more “magic quarters” than I can remember. These were worth a dollar or more, depending on the amount of magic they contained. I also believed Fun Dip was cocaine and that my brother was addicted to it for at least a week. He denies a lot of this, but I stand by it. Who remembers a crime better, the victim or t...

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 ...