Twenty-four struck me as "almost responsible enough to rent a car." Once you're renting cars, you may as well be purchasing car seats, for the children that you've borne and support with the job you dislike. Twenty-four was impending reality. Twenty-four was one too many parties in your past, it was one too many bars, it was the novelty worn off. If I were to begin a sentence "today I turn twenty-four," I suspected that I'd have to finish it with "so alas, I am too old to star in pornography."

"I'm getting old!" I mourned to myself for the first time in my life.

Thanks to various social networking sites, casual acquaintances and coworkers were unusually aware of the date. And somehow, every single exchange went exactly the same way.

"Happy birthday, Adrianne! What is it, your . . . 25th? 26th? You're not 27 yet?" [Generic clarification.] "What? Seriously? Christ, you're a baby. Now quit making me feel old."

Damnable zeitgeist. There's nothing for it. If you can't beat 'em, . . . etc.

The first few pages are shaky, boring: I annoy myself with repetitive sentences about tooth brushing and wardrobe choices. Thirty or so pages in I feel like I'm starting to make some pretty astute observations about my menial life; maybe I should write some of this down. And by page fifty, I'm making shit up.

Exciting shit.

I'd read through page twenty-four of What is the What on the subway yesterday heading toward Nick's apartment. When I got off the train to transfer, I actually convinced myself for a moment that I was laying on the tracks, where I'd just been pushed; a bizarre assortment of limbs and broken rib bones, I was staring blearily at the black grime dripping from the ceiling, the vibrations of distant trains trembling the metal beneath me. Meanwhile, a stranger was disappearing back into the crowd.

So the narrative had gone.

"I have to take pictures of this adorable kitten playing and sleeping," I think to myself, "because that is my job."

2. Jurvis is going skydiving, and has somehow brought his laptop computer and iSight with him, so that he can email me pictures of the sunset as he goes. I think this is pretty great.

"Surprise," someone says. "You're in a plane now! Your turn!" And they push me out the door.

I fall slowly, serenely. The entire sky is pink clouds.

3. "That's a pretty great sweater," someone says to me. "What?" I say. "Your sweater. It's magical." "Magical!" "Haven't you noticed? Not only is it the softest sweater in the world, but it shifts its color depending on the light and your surroundings. During a sunny day it glows white. On a clear night it's deep blue. They call it the moon rock sweater."

"Sweet!" I say.

Mason Jennings - Which Way Your Heart Will Go

"You know I can't push!" the woman cried plaintively. "My knee!"

"Well then point the wheels in the right direction for once! You're backing the car right into another freakin' iceberg, you know that?"

"Hello!" I chirped. "Do you need some help?"

I'd asked this same question to another individual that morning. I'd thought it was some burly hunter man given the scary truck and camouflage ensemble, but after I spoke the face of a mid-teen girl peeked out nervously from her bright orange hood. She'd reacted to me the same way these people would. First, surprise and alarm to the emergence of words from a stranger. Second, the look: up and down. I'm no body builder.

"Uh . . . no, thanks," she'd said. "I think I'll just . . . y'know, stay here."

This couple took the other Boston attitude. There are, in fact, two total.

"What?" the guy sighed, exasperated. "Are we blockin' your driveway or somethin'?"

Making contact

I think there were four other people in the entire building. To pass time before the movie ("Alaska: Spirit of the Wild") we explored the solar system.

This is "Rick on a Stick" -- a little metal man you put on the globe to imagine yourself in different time zones and seasons. What?

"Rick on a Stick" is displaced

Salmon, Eskimos, unfathomable jagged snowy mountains only reachable by plane. I'm sold, especially in summertime. Twenty-four hours of light! Bring it. (Did you know male polar bears will eat their own children if the mother's not around? Fucked up shit, polar bears. No wonder you're going freaking extinct.)

What? What do you mean?

"Well actually it was called a chalazion. An oil duct in your eyelid that gets clogged and swells up."

Someone pointed out that she'd just learned about chalazions in her veterinary classes. Crazy!

"Bright red, huge, looks repulsive? Yeah. Everyone was always asking me what the heck it was. Didn't do much for the boys. I had to put a hot pack on it every night." I considered all of this, like the plot of a book read long ago. "Huh, I guess I had that thing for about two years."

Two years? Jesus.

"For a long time I was completely convinced that I was going to have it for the rest of my life. Then one day it just went away."

Apparently to be forgotten for eight years, neatly compartmentalized like the massive lump itself. Which is especially odd, as I remembered later: since I had it for more than two years: it came back in high school, for some amount of time that I can't recall. There were multiple doctor visits, a device that clenched over the eyelid to keep it pried open, needles, steroid injections. They had to hold down my hands so I wouldn't push the doctor's away, I'd scream into his face, flail my legs. And yet I hated it, desired to cut it off myself. Which eyelid was it on? I don't remember that either. Actually, all I can really remember is the day it left for good.

It happened as follows: a boy and soon-to-be-boyfriend, in the throes of hormones and therefore oblivious to hideous deformities, was chasing me on the steps of our high school at lunch. I reached forward in the vain attempt to grab a scarf he had taken in impish boyness, and suddenly the world was half-bathed in a milky-white blur. I nearly crashed into our school flag pole.

"I am going blind," I thought. "I will need a seeing-eye dog. Oh well. To make up for my pitiable state he'll have to have an awesome name, like Barnacle." Then "wait, sweet, I'm cured."

I darted inside to the bathroom and grabbed a tissue as quickly as possible to wipe the mess away. Two swipes, gone. I stared at the mirror in disbelief.

When I ran back outside that day I was a normal high school girl again with two smooth, shiny eyelids, chasing a boy who had never seemed to notice the disfigurement before, who now made no reference to its absence. It was all over in a matter of seconds, and so unceremoniously that I was doomed to forget it had ever happened at all. I could have told you right then. It was already removed, compartmentalized, nonhistory. And the boxes of family photographs in our basement, hundreds of images per year, do not contain a single picture of it.

No problem. We know what podcasting is.

Least satisfying instant messenger conversation ever.

Nothing, you say.

The method is as follows: first, think about the person receiving said mix, and comb your entire music collection. With every song that fits them, drag the file into a new playlist; there is no method to your madness. This will take several awesome hours, in which you rediscover songs you've long forgotten. You'll remember previous relationships, previous sadnesses, previous drives around the lake with the windows down: you'll think to yourself "there are so many stories I've never written down." This step is the most self-indulgent. Enjoy it. What if you started a novel tomorrow?

Once you've gone through the Z artists, create playlist number two. Title this "final." Now go through the first playlist, and choose the top four or five songs that absolutely must make it onto this mix, for this person, at this time.

Wait a day. Let it steep a little.

Return to your final playlist and listen to your top songs again, and then return to your first playlist. You need transition songs. Insert one or two more strong songs, perhaps ones you'd considered putting on that playlist before but hesitated given the lack of transitions.

Listen to this playlist. You're missing a couple of songs, and that one song isn't as strong as you thought it was.

Wait a day. Listen to the new playlist, again.

It may be done now. Probably not. Probably there's something off about it. You may need to comb through your entire music collection again, and repeat the whole process again, on a smaller scale. Lather, rinse, repeat. It may never end. It probably will.

"And that's how I do it," I said to Jurvis earnestly. "It's this whole complex process!"

"Yeah?" he replied. "You know, I pretty much do it the same way."

Give Nick money! Confuse pedestrians in your hometown! Get your own here.

These rules are not posted any where in the yoga studio, which is otherwise quite pleasant and friendly, but appear to be some kind of unwritten code you are left to discover on your own -- not unlike the names of most Boston city streets. Do not get naked. It doesn't matter if your yoga class was heated to eighty-five degrees, and you were doing sun salutations as if the sun were an angry drill sergeant. (Inhale! Get down, high push-up, pause, upward dog, downward dog, jump forward, inhale!) Look around you. No one else is showering: they're pulling clothing over their sweaty clothes, grabbing scarves, leaving hastily and half-dressed and never speaking a word. The dressing room is a wake for an abusive husband.

But now, stop looking around you, you're making everyone uncomfortable. What is this, seventh grade again? You're inspired to wrap the towel around your clothed, sweaty body first, and remove your clothing out from underneath it: a tricky affair which you haven't attempted since you were twelve, and even then you quickly abandoned it for practical purposes. Stop, you tell yourself, this is ridiculous, but you can't because you hate making anyone uncomfortable. You walk quickly to the showers, eager to be out of the way of these unwilling eyes.

But this morning is different from all the rest. Crap, crap, crap. There's someone else in the showers. You can hear her on the other side of the flimsy curtains, hiding from you. You have to start the water quickly, to cover the sound of her, of another human being so violently wishing to be alone.

So you inch into your curtained stall and hastily turn the knob, and when you hear a sudden shuffle you look up, like anyone would, like animals are bred to do, simply to survive. Oh, god. It's now that you realize -- too late! -- that one of the three curtain "walls" has been slightly open this entire time, and it was the curtain you shared, and there she is, you can see her now, backed against the one tile wall with her cringing eyes averted, inexplicably still clothed in the shower!

"Oh . . . oh," you say, trying to laugh a little. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to . . . get you all wet."

She is frozen, terrified of you. You look away, and minutes later there is the sound of a hand grabbing curtain cloth and yanking it shut.