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• My upstairs neighbor’s boyfriend needs to work on his stamina.

• Jezebel is the bible’s first recorded prostitute. She is literally the oldest trick in the book.

• Haters gonna give you anxiety.

• Emails that start “Who’s in charge of…” seldom end in “because I want to pay them a compliment!”

• My teeth are tanner than my face.

• A Z is just a 7 with skis.

My biggest problem, if I had to admit to one (aside from my totally rational fear of fruit), is my seeming determination to make the same mistakes over and over again. Like how I keep thinking I can pull off blonde hair (it might help if I didn’t keep going to cheap salons and ending up with a color less “Blonde” and more “Dehydrated Pee Yellow”) and how I have made out with not one, but three improv actors. Which is great if you like noisy dudes in skinny ties, but problematic if you are made uncomfortable by emphatic gesticulation and disproportionate reactions when doing such innocuous things as ordering a beer they’re not particularly fond of or breaking up with them out of left field. (You’re clamorously pretending to ride a statue in a city park for the third time today? Yes, and... I think we should see other people.)…

• Of course! The cheese is in the closet!

• I only had regular cheese so I shot holes in it!

• Oooh, there’s a stink bomb?! Stinkyyyyy…

• That’s a pretty umbrella.

• I’m comin for that booty where you at

• My heart is beating too fast, I’m going to have a heart attack

• There you go! There's the lady that talks in my ear and tells me what to do!

• Tooooomaaatooooo!!!

• DIVE!!! [Hums "Ride of the Valkyries"]

I started a new job last March, and a few weeks into my tenure as Middle Manager in Industry Parents Don’t Know How to Explain, our primarily international team was flying out to Tahoe to meet each other and sit through four straight days of meetings to plan the upcoming year. I was a little nervous about this, as it had been so long since I had met new people in a professional environment, so in order to brighten up my appearance and give me a little superficial pick-me-up, I decided to get an eyebrow wax. In true Katie fashion (i.e. pathology), I waited until the day before I left to get this done. I mean it had to happen at some point. My eyebrows had been unattended for so long I was starting to look like Groucho Marx trapped in Jumanji…

Today marks one month on the patch and one month smoke-free. I celebrated by working out for the first time in months, and by working out, I mean doing a surprisingly grueling six minute phone app circuit under the supervision of my cat, who was, of course, staring me dead in the eye and licking her butthole the entire time. Which I took as a sort of encouragement to cleanse myself of former bad habits. I can do this! I thought to myself, her metered slurps like a chant propelling me onward. Kate! Kate! Kate! Kate! Emboldened, I obeyed the robotic voice emanating from my phone, my scalp beading with sweat, which is the only place I sweat most of the time, so even in comfort, I look like it's raining. I jumping-jacked, I squat-jumped, I crunched. I gritted my teeth and worked the fuck out. The minutes went by like kidney stones through a urethra, and I thought, well, this sucks. I'd rather chew off my own foot and then legally marry it than do this again. And then timer rang. My six minutes was up. I heaved myself out of the push-up position and then strutted over to the mirror. You look the same, but damp and sad. Hell yeah. Day One in the books….

Pretending to sleep at parties where no drinking was taking place because I thought this made me “cooler than the party”

• Drinking a lot of orange juice (“Oh, what am I doing? Just listening to some music, drinking orange juice.” -Me, feeling fly, circa 2002)

• Wearing candy necklaces until the color started to wear off on my skin

• The band Mest

• Sneaking up to people’s houses in the middle of the night (before curfew, of course) and sidewalk chalking up their driveways (That wild, unpredictable suburban life, you know?)

• Pretending I had never heard of various pop artists

• Pretending to be afraid of E.T.

• Coughing when someone made eye contact with me because I thought that made me more mysterious (???)…

Captain's Log: Day Four

Cabin fever is beginning to set in. I haven't seen the sunlight or known a man's touch in four endless days. The cat paces wearily about the apartment, longing desperately for the stimulation and companionship my enfeebled mind can no longer provide. As the sun stretches lazily across the afternoon sky, I seize an opportunity. Clad only in soup-stained sweats and salty snow boots, I descend the stairs with the tepid anticipation of one who has nothing left, a husk of the woman I had once striven to be. Timidly, I open the door and the wind rushes my face, stealing my breath. I set an intrepid course for CVS, strangers floating past me like ghosts, as if in a dream, their faces contorting before me with such hideously transparent ponderings as, "The shadow of death is imminent upon her" and "Egads! What’s that smell?" I can no longer comprehend their horror. I have been gone away too long…

Author’s Note: Now, I am not exactly what one would call a “chill person.” Just last night, I was reading about pancreatic cancer and became convinced that this slight pain in my back meant that I had it (and not, of course, that I had been immobile for several hours googling things like “kesha best friends” and “whale sex” and my body had likely started to atrophy from inactivity) and I had to look up a diagram of the human body to determine where my pancreas actually was and the likelihood that it would revolt against me like The Order of the Phoenix and assassinate me for my tyrannical refusal to feed it anything but cheese and Mountain Dew. I also get stressed out by such terrifying monstrosities as voicemails, the cold, and my clock being wrong, so clearly I am a paragon of calm and comfort. I’m like wet socks personified.

So here are some things people other than just me tend to worry about:

• When I sneeze with headphones in and can’t tell if someone said “Bless you” or not so I don’t know if I should say “Thank you” so I sneeze and then say “Thank you” to the world just in case as though thanking the universe for the privilege of sneezing.

• When it’s raining and I don’t have an umbrella but still want to smoke so I flatten myself against the wall like the Pink Panther to quickly suck down a cigarette while trying not to get my admittedly mediocre hair-do wet because I have a tendency toward vanity.

• The presence of fruit….

If you were to describe me to someone who hasn’t met me, you might say such things as: “She will use any excuse to show you a picture (or several) of her cat“; or, “She is unbearably pedantic about Harry Potter”; or, ”It is probably not wise to ask her to share her cheese plate.” All of these descriptors would be accurate. But the characteristic of my personality that has perhaps gotten me into the most trouble is my unparalleled ability to trust the things that people tell me without question. I believed my high school friend’s claim that she was an extra in Remember the Titans (she wasn’t), and someone once convinced me that motorcycles didn’t have to obey traffic laws because their engine would melt if they stopped moving (it doesn't). But in one particular circumstance, this blind trust of mine got me in trouble in the most egregious way.

The year was 1996…

Welcome one and all to the brand spanking new [Fill This Out Later]! I’ve migrated from Tumblr to my very own domain, and if you are expecting this blog post to describe all of FTOL’s exciting new features so that you don’t have to expend energy discovering them yourself, TOO BAD, because instead I’m going to complain about how freaking hard it is to build a website when you 1) are worse at technology than a lobotomized tree stump and 2) have the frustration tolerance of a sunburned toddler coming off a coke bender. (The drug or the soda, kids can’t handle caffeine. Or analogy overload.)…