anonymously make an assumption about me and i'll confirm/deny it

What do you consider the pillars of your diet? Like not what you consider the most delicious, or even necessarily your “favorite” food, but the food that if you look within your heart and are honest with yourself actually eat more often than anything else? I think mine is toast, broccoli, and eggs

Yogurt every damn day

When Wikipedia has articles with notes that sound hauntingly like your agent. . . .

[Image: Wikipedia screencap reading "This article's plot summary may be too long or excessively detailed. Please help improve it by removing unnecessary details and making it more concise."]

Those of you who know my work here have probably noticed that I can be . . . a little comprehensive when I write stuff. It's been a bit of a problem in my life as an author since the very beginning. I can be concise now, but I don't default to it. I think it might be just partly natural inclination and partly a little bit of childhood trauma surrounding being consistently misunderstood and therefore wanting to be Very Specific and Detailed with my communication.

The first time I signed with a literary agent (holy cheezwhiz was that over ten years ago now??) I got a "wow" reaction from my pitch but the agent literally asked me to drop over 40,000 words from the word count. AND I DID IT. One of the hardest things I've ever done.

(Weirdly the agent later said she kinda regretted asking me to do that because "I love your words," but publishing industry standards are what they are.)

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#laughs in florida

i saw a dumb tweet. here's a poll for people who read a lot of books as kids. there's no moral judgment attached to this poll at all; i do not care if it was your favourite book, that's completely fine, you don't have to lie just because you hate jkr now. answer honestly to the best of your recollection.

Add in the comments if you think you look your age and what others guess

I'm sure some of this has to do with me being very short, but I am mistaken for a lot younger than I am pretty often and it's usually in a way that does not feel like a compliment. It more comes across as "I know you are [X] age, not the age you are claiming to be, and therefore I don't respect you or trust you to do what you claim to be doing."

ONE

The first time I was harassed for not looking my age was when I was still in high school. My mom and I were grocery shopping together and she "celebrated" my turning 18 by asking me to go buy cigarettes for her at the customer service counter while she finished shopping for food. (In my area, you have to be 18 to buy tobacco products.) I did not want to do it but she wanted me to want to do it, if that makes sense. (She thought I would be so excited to buy cigarettes even though I was not into such things, and she was really disappointed that I wasn't itching to do Mature Things so she hollered at me in the store and "made" me do it.) So I went and did it, then waited for her to come to the grocery line. I gave her her bag of cigarettes and went and waited by the water fountains to let her finish checking out. And then store security came up and cornered me.

"Stay right there," they said. "Don't try to leave the store."

I was like "huh? I'm not trying to leave the store. Just waiting for my mom."

"AND WHERE ARE THE CIGARETTES??" the guy barked at me.

I told him I'd picked them up for my mom and she had them. They didn't want to let me walk over and show them where my mom was and kept arguing with me that I had done something nefarious with the cigarettes. I had to wait until she came over to figure out what the big deal was before they would let me go. Gosh, thanks for letting me do something that's So Mature, Mom!

TWO

The next time was when I went to Las Vegas for my birthday. (My dad had promised me this trip when I was four years old. He turned out to be a compulsive gambler later. He's in a program for it.) Obviously since I was newly 21 and knew very well that I looked young, I was expecting to get carded a lot in casinos. But at one point while sitting at a slot machine by myself in the middle of the night, a random security person walked up and asked me to show her my ID. I showed it and she said "You can't be here though. You aren't old enough."

Well that got my attention. "Huh? The ID shows my birthday. I'm old enough."

"NO YOU'RE NOT," she insisted. And said in a kind of threatening way that my birth date indicated I was under twenty-one. Considering that my dad and I had definitely planned this trip around my birthday so I would be allowed to do stuff, I surely was not mistaken about when it would be legal. I told her that was not the case, repeated what my birthday was and did the math for her, and she gave me a squinted look and told me she would be back, leaving and taking my ID card with her.

Shortly after, she came back, handed it back to me, and said "Happy birthday." And explained that she had been working overnights and didn't know what day it is anymore. Mmkay.

THREE

When I was in my mid-thirties, on the way to my mother's house, she asked me to pick up a few things at the store, including cigarettes. (This is a theme in my life.) The cashier asked for my ID to buy the cigarettes and at that point I laughed because if I had been HALF my age I would have still been old enough to buy the cigarettes. The cashier barked, "It ain't funny, honey."

I showed her my ID and she looked at it, looked at me, and then said "This isn't you."

Huh?

"I can't let you buy these. This isn't you on the ID."

I told her I didn't know what she was talking about and yes, it was me and that was my ID. I'm guessing she was trying to process someone she'd thought was UNDER EIGHTEEN claiming to be born in the 1970s on their ID.

The woman told me that she was not going to put her job on the line by letting me "get away with" buying cigarettes, and she called her manager, preemptively voiding the sale. (I kept the receipt that I later got. It said "UNDERAGE CUSTOMER" on it.) I had to stand there and wait for her to check out other people in line while we waited for the manager to be available, which made me late to my mom's. Thankfully, when the manager finally did arrive, she just looked at my ID and said "Nah, that's her," and let me buy the cigarettes. The original cashier said absolutely nothing to me and went on checking out the other customers without even looking at me. Welp. At least the manager believed me and they didn't try to escalate.

FOUR

Most recently, a man at my workplace told me I was using the term "bluescreen" incorrectly (when I said I had been kicked out of a meeting because my computer bluescreened). He insisted that bluescreens don't happen anymore (uh, yeah they do) and that the term referred to computers in the 1990s, when the error screen was "actually blue." (Yeah. Current bluescreens not only still exist but are still blue.) He claimed that I "would not remember" the original bluescreens because as a Millennial, this would predate me.

(Bluescreening computers are older than the 1990s, but let's not talk about that. Because I am also older than the 1990s.)

I informed him that I was not a Millennial and that I did remember the bluescreens of the 1990s because I dealt with them liberally when they were freezing me out of my college coursework.

"You were in college in the 1990s?" he asked. "I thought you were about 25 years old."

(So he thought I was more than TWENTY years younger than I was at the time.)

ANYWAY

Other than that it's mostly been silly misunderstandings and goofy stuff. People ringing me up for kids' tickets at the movies even when we didn't ask for them, until I was in my mid-twenties. Being asked if I needed a booster seat or a kids' menu in a restaurant when I was in college. Having someone mistake me for my best friend's daughter in a bar (she's only 2 years older than me). Being turned away at a karaoke bar because they insisted I was underage, even though I was with someone who was younger than me whom they didn't even card. People finding out I'm old enough to be their mom when they thought I was their age. Multiple cases of buying alcohol (which I rarely do, but I have bought it for celebrations or for cooking/baking) and having people make weird/funny comments when they see my actual birth year.

I don't know if all of this is partly because everyone's supposed to try to look 20 until they're 70 so we have no idea what people in their 30s, 40s, and 50s look like, but damn is it annoying when disrespect is part of how younger people are treated and you never even get to grow out of it.

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LOL. I had no idea how many but suspected it was in the 100+ category. Turned slightly to my right and started counting. When I hit the 80s before finishing two shelves and hadn't even gotten to the other shelves in the same room (to say nothing of other rooms), I figured I'd just hit the 100+ button and go.

hold on gotta google something

Yeah why did he say that

LOL. Ween is that kind of band. It is kinda . . . weirder to find a song where they DON'T have some lyrics like that. Quite a lot of lyrics like that.

I sorta grew up with Ween. Saw them in concert 3 times. Met them once (baked them a cake). I was 16 and wearing a happy birthday chuck e cheese shirt. I carried a cassette copy of their first studio album in my purse in high school (and one time a dude in my English class saw me reading the lyrics insert, asked to see it, handed it back to me, and said "You only listen to this shit because no one else does." Fuck you eric).

Many of the songs I grew up with sound like they were recorded in a bathroom or while driving around in the back of a truck. They have songs with titles like "Piss Up a Rope" and "Don't Shit Where You Eat." Many songs include phrases like "get your fingers out your ass" or "my peepee is red." One time they completely stole a song from Prince and rewrote the lyrics to be about oral sex, and said in an interview that they did it without permission on purpose to see if they could get Prince to sue them because they really wanted to talk to his expensive lawyer. (They were offended that he did not notice.)

I still own some really rare vinyl records of theirs.

this does not apply if you wear exclusively leggings. Those things tear all the time you need like a million on standby

I know everyone's different but the "what in the world what the hell how could this possibly be how anyone lives" reaction to people having more than six pairs of pants is very strange to me.

Maybe because I just like . . . have always had a lot of clothes. Which is maybe weird because I'm not like a fashion person or whatever. I think a lot of it has to do with how I take pretty good care of my clothes, don't have a lifestyle where my clothes take a beating, and mend my clothes if they do get a rip or wear out.

I just went and counted, out of curiosity. I have 38 pairs of pants that aren't leggings or shorts or whatever. (???) This doesn't count some that are in a box that don't fit me though.

Am I a clothes hoarder or something?

I don't even know how to estimate how many tops I have but I can definitely say it's over 500. and I wonder what kind of judgment that number would get me.