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• Walked into a sex toy store and threw the door open so violently that it slammed into a wall of dildos, sending about a dozen of them flying and bouncing across the floor in unpredictable directions.

• Misdialed a phone number from my office phone and accidentally called a sex hotline at work.

• Got twisted up in a blanket and fell off the couch, straining a muscle in my foot and causing me to walk with a limp for a week.

• I relish in doing a bit called “Bad Comedian” in the shower in which I do horrible stand-up into my shampoo bottle. (“I have seven billion Facebook friends, because Facebook friends are like Pokemon. You gotta catch ‘em all.”)

• Got diarrhea in a hotel lobby bathroom and made an entire tour bus of people wait half an hour for me as I slowly descended into increasingly frantic panic and then told them I couldn’t find my passport to try to save face.

• Broke my toe on a Slip‘N Slide and then got them banned from my house. (Sorry, sisters.)

• Ate a two day-old taquito from 7-11 and then threw up afterwards.

• Lightly rear-ended a car because I sneezed too hard. (No damage was done.)

• Being embarrassed that I had started smoking again, I sprayed myself with a bathroom product called Poo-Purri for two weeks, leaving my colleagues confused about the brief period in which the office smelled like ginger.

• Blew out a speaker in my car listening to Britney Spears.

• Drove an hour to work, sat down at my desk, realized there was cat pee all over my shirt, left immediately and worked the rest of the day from home. Earned the nickname “Pee Pants” for this.

I generally have the body temperature of a margarita at a Siberian ski lodge, and this has caused some issues with my boyfriend, who would, as he says, “sweat naked in a snowstorm,” or, as I have come to learn, thinks the radiators are just for decoration and persistently has our A/C set to “Meat Locker.” On the bright side, we can store our frozen goods right on the couch, which is great for late night Netflix binges when the only movement we’ve had in the last six hours is to shift our atrophying bodies to alleviate bed sores, chisel frozen tears off our faces (sports documentaries, though) and reach our (well, my) weak, shivering hands through the frigid air to the towering stack of freezer-burned food on the coffee table to half-heartedly fight over the last pint of rock-solid Chunky Monkey. We threw our refrigerator out due to redundancy…

Writer’s Note: Years ago, just out of college, I submitted this cover letter to the HR department at a food delivery app company in an attempt to get my first copywriting job. I was completely unqualified for the job but in desperate need of a new gig, so I hoped this cover letter would distract from my lackluster resume and differentiate me from my competition. They did not email me back. 

Dear Hiring Manager:

Applying for a job is a daunting task. You make yourself completely vulnerable to total strangers and put yourself at the mercy of their judgment. You have to convince other people that not only do they want you around, but they want to pay money to spend time with you and listen to you talk. You have to show them what makes you better than the guy next to you in the identical suit with the same look of hopefulness and faint scent of nervous B.O. Especially when it’s a job that you think you’re perfect for. (To be clear, I’m talking about the Copywriting job and me, Katie. Minus the B.O. part. That’s about some other guy.)…

I have always been a fairly serious student, in part because A’s are like crack to me and also because if I didn’t get them, I was grounded. I also fancy myself as a creative type person (ask anyone I went to college with how much I bragged about my Creative Writing degree. It’s a wonder I had any friends, and a miracle I found employment upon graduation), so when school projects came along that allowed me to exercise my creativity on my quest for the perfect grade, I threw myself wholeheartedly into developing a presentation that would knock the socks off my teachers and the rest of my generally unimpressed classmates and catapult my GPA that much closer to perfection. I was really fun at parties…

• What is Percoset? That sounds like a better name for Botox.

• When you rolled over and said, “Unghhh,” you were thinking about me, right?

• I’m going to start a body positive campaign called “Tits All Relative.”

• You know who are the worst kinds of people? The ones who have inspirational quotes in their email signatures. I’m sorry, Carol, but Marilyn Monroe would rather you get me that document on time than tell your colleagues to dance like nobody’s watching. Marilyn also thinks purple Papyrus is unprofessional. Also, I’m setting up cameras in your office. Also, she never said that.

• I’m probably not going to clean our room tomorrow like I said I would. I’m going to make macaroni and cheese and take several naps instead.

• If the ugly duckling grew up into a beautiful swan, that’s some witchcraft shit, and we need to get science on that.

• Please stop giving the cat bacon. She’s getting bold, and yesterday she took a bite of my cheese sandwich. Yesterday she also learned that she doesn’t like mustard. It was like watching a baby eat a lemon.

Having been raised under the philosophy of, “Question everything, believe nothing you’re told” from an early age, which, despite being brought up Catholic and attending mass with enough frequency that I could, to this day, recite The Lord’s Prayer backwards on PCP, my parents have found themselves with three more or less agnostic daughters, of which I may be the most skeptical. I can trace my affinity toward skepticism to one specific incident, however, in which the value of inquisition made its most formative appearance in my life. Christmas Eve, 1994. I was writing my letter to Santa with profound sincerity because there were Polly Pockets on the line and I was almost painfully aware of my long history of being, even as a child, an unrepentant smartass. “Dear Santa, I have been very good this year (except for the time my little sister and I were left home alone for a few minutes and she ended up covered in chocolate syrup) and I would like the Polly Pocket school set that comes with real stamps you can cover yourself with like tattoos (which I will later get several of and bother my mother) that I will get bored of after about a month and abandon to recruit my sisters into an Ace of Base cover band using a stick of sidewalk chalk as a microphone and probably driving the neighbors into increasingly irritated madness with my megaphone-loud tone-deafness and propensity toward hamming it up.” I signed the letter, set it next to the plate of cookies and glass of skim milk (Santa is on a diet, my dad had said) and then a thought appeared in my little child mind. The whole thing was implausible, was it not?…

Like any decent American with a penchant towards the irrational, I hate birds. First of all, once you finally get to that point in the year where the weather has turned from “This giant purple coat-beast is the only thing standing between me and frostbite but makes me look like a shriveled eggplant with no curves to speak of” to “IT’S PATIO SEASON, BITCHES,” your slumberous dreams of accepting a Pulitzer for best pizza-related nonfiction are interrupted at an ungodly hour by the chattery little bastards perched outside your bedroom window yammering on and on like that coworker you have that goes to the gym before work and wants to talk to you about almond milk at a pace akin to an auctioneer on speed before you’ve had your morning dumptruck of coffee. Look, I get that you’re just happy to be alive because you have tiny little brains and don’t understand such atrocities as running out of toilet paper in a Joann Fabrics bathroom or Donald Trump’s sniveling little mouth, and you probably found a dope worm just now and have reason to celebrate, but it’s four o’clock in the morning and ya’ll are partying like that neighbor I had once whom I dubbed Cranky Gymshorts for obvious reasons whose late night/early morning routine consisted of blasting terrible country music and yelling at his girlfriend. Some of us were up till three trying to determine if Ross and Rachel are ever going to make it and need some freaking sleep. Stop your damn selves…

• Brian puts the cap on the toothpaste so tight that I need a towel to open it without slicing my hand open because I have delicate weiner hands and he is basically Popeye.

• My cat tries to take my cheese knife from me.

• My feet fall asleep while I’m pooping because I’m too short for my toilet.

• I make notes in my phone about things I want to write about and then don’t understand them later (E.g. “Cannonball land” and “Gumdrop Hotel.”).

• The direct correlation between how cold it is outside and how chatty Brian gets while smoking a cigarette.

Summary: A requisitely enthusiastic worker who excels at following directions to managerial satisfaction and strives to live my life with as much excitement as someone who just saw themselves on the Jumbotron. A real go-getter if the thing I am going to get is nachos and I am getting them by ordering them on my phone and then consoling myself through the wait time with a brick of cheddar.

Objective: To find a job that is marginally better than my current one, because I just bought a record player despite owning no actual records and am seriously considering adopting a hedgehog, so, clearly, I am in need of a change.

Skills: Taking an excessive number of pictures of my cat and then getting bored one day and changing the contact photo for every person in my phone to pictures of her cute widdle face. Drinking half a gallon of milk a day and then complaining about my pants being too tight.

I am what you’d call an indoor girl. I generally choose my entertainment destinations based on if there will be ample seating and a guaranteed absence of bugs, although I once went camping and peed in the woods without screaming, so I’m basically Davy Crockett in a dress. This is due largely to my phobia of bees and the time my ex knocked a coffee timer off the counter causing a sustained high pitched squealing to erupt from the broken instrument and dozens of cockroaches came flooding out of the cabinets and drains like a biblical plague except worse because it happened to me. I do like spending time outside if it involves a patio and cigarettes and people bringing me beer in exchange for money, and I did golf on the regular back in the day, although it’s been so long since I’ve hit the links that my swing now looks like I’m trying to hit a tornado of ghosts with a club. Despite this, when my neighbors invited my ex and I to the beach to play sports one weekend, I dusted off my softball glove and threw on a pair of already ripped jeans because they were comfortable enough to move around in and I have the tendency to fall down. I am constantly slamming my shins into the bed frame and tripping over imagined cracks in the sidewalk. I once gave myself a black eye because I ran into a door frame trying to find my keys in the dark. My makeup shade is “Bruise.”…