My, um, mom used to have my cousins, three boys, over to her house quite often when they were little to spend the night and to spend some time. And what she usually would do is, she had pajamas that they could wear at her house so they didn't have to bring pajamas every time. They -- it was usually just like a big T-shirt, like some of my sister and my old t-shirts that we didn't wear anymore, and when they were little they just were -- just kind of longer, you know, on them or bigger on them but they, but they liked that. So, she would usually -- they'd usually come, they'd change into the pajamas, and she'd usually throw their clothes in laundry. And oftentimes all three of them would just run around with those big T-shirts on. So, underwear obviously, but no, no shorts or pants, they just liked to wear the big T-shirts. That was like the cool thing that they wanted to do. So, they were doing that and their clothes were in the laundry, and I think my mom was -- my mom was not in the living room. I know that. She was down -- she was down the hallway, somewhere. And my sister and her, at the time, boyfriend, now her husband, but her then boyfriend were coming over as well and they pulled into the driveway and I said, oh, you know, "[Boyfriend] and [sister] are here. That's exciting," or something. So, the youngest of the boys. I was sitting in one of the chairs in the living room. He comes over to me super close, like as close as he could get to me and he said, "I need pants." And he had this just horrible look on his face, like he was mortified. Like he just was so embarrassed. "I need pants." I think he was okay, he felt comfortable just wearing this T-shirt around the family, but I think that thinking about my sister's boyfriend coming over and him not really knowing him and like having it be, I don't -- maybe they -- maybe that was the first time they met him? I don't know. I don't think it was, but again, I think, you know, he didn't often see him. They didn't -- they lived in Indiana at the time so they didn't -- they didn't see…

A lot of my injuries have been the result of doing silly things. I remember riding my bicycle through backyards in my neighborhood in 1989,1990. And I literally clotheslined myself. It was actually my mom's boyfriend's neighborhood, if we're being fully transparent here, which is only important to know because it means I was not super familiar with the environment. But as far as I could see, there was just really no fences, just open boundaries between yards. I was trying to take a shortcut back to my mom's boyfriend's backyard, and I could not see the clothesline in the neighbor's backyard. And it clipped me, like, almost like, you know, uh... Wait, oh no, why am I blanking, in horse riding, when you’re -- it's not jousting, is it the joust? You know when you have the big spear and your -- the lance, so to speak? It was kind of like that. It just knocked me off my “horse,” except instead of horse, it was my small little BMX bike. So, yeah, that was silly. I learned. No one was around to watch that one. So you feel embarrassed, but like, no one saw it. I still feel ridiculous. It's pretty funny how you just bounce back up back then. I have a feeling that it would affect me more now.

I went to visit, I went over to a guy I went to school with. I don’t think I’d ever been to his house before. And his parents were away and they had like a college student or somebody house-sitting with them. And she was kinda like in the mix, like we were down, I went down to talk with them. Maybe we were gonna play D&D, I don’t remember. But she was like right there, and I happened to look over on their -- what they had hanging on the wall, they had these fabulous like Native American rugs. And I said, “Oh my gosh, those are awesome! I like those Navajo rugs.” And um, oh gosh how did I hear about this.  Maybe it was later, one of the guys who was like at the house told me that after I left, she said that I was like obnoxious or hard to like or something. And one of the reasons she -- like the example that she gave or like the evidence she gave, was that I was being a know-it-all by looking at the rugs and saying what tribe had made them. And that just really floored me because I was like, well, I mean, I traveled down to New Mexico and Utah and other areas of the Southwest with my family, and we actually did have some Navajo rugs at our house. But I wasn’t really trying to pretend to be some kind of expert in like, Southwest American textiles. That’s actually just like, what they are called. Like even if you have like a Hopi or a Zuni weaver, people going down there they’d say, “Hey, I’d love to see some Navajo rugs.” So I just, I felt so unjustly accused. I mean, I was simply using just this sort of vernacular vocabulary, and she was accusing me of being like some kind of specialist. 

Every year when I was a junior high teacher, at the end of the year, we had a kind of a 8th grade end of the year, graduation type ceremony. And the high school graduated and they were done using the auditorium and so we would hold ours at the auditorium when they were done. Okay. So as an 8th grade teacher, I had to go over there and help them get organized and practiced, their going in and coming out and all that other good stuff. And I bought a lovely new pair of capris in a nice khaki color and I wore them to school that day that we were going over to do the practicing cuz I knew it was gonna be a -- and these were kind of like cargo khakis and so they were good because I could put all the stuff I needed to go over to the high school without having to carry my purse and all that other stuff, so it was great. So I did that, I got this really cute little sweater vesty thing that went with it. I bought the whole outfit from Eddie Bauer. It looked really good, I was happy. Get over to the high school, and I sat down in one of the front, very front row auditorium seats to watch the kids do their thing. And as I did that, I caught my pants on a spring that was sitting up in the auditorium seat because those seats were being replaced as soon as school got out, not knowing that the first row was not somewhere where people were supposed to sit, and I ripped my pants. Well I didn't have the opportunity to go back to the other school so I took off my vest. Which fortunately was a cardigan type and tied it around my butt and just kept going. And one of the kids said, “What are you doing?” and my other teacher buddies said to me, “What are you doing? That looks ridiculous.” I said, “It doesn't look as ridiculous as the fact that I have a big hole in my pants.” I said, “Don't sit in that seat,” and she went, “Ohhhh.” Anyway, I was lucky it was the end of the day that we were doing this but it was really, really not one of my favorite teaching days.

This is something that happened when I was probably four. My parents and I lived on a small farm, forty acre farm. We had a few beef cows. We had a few chickens. I don't know if we had pigs at that time or not. I don't remember the pigs. And there's a picture of me with some baby ducks, so maybe we had ducks, too. I don't know, I don't remember the ducks.  But these beef cows, you know, the purpose of raising beef cows is to have calves and raise up the calves and sell them. And, one day a guy drove in with his car and my dad and I went and walked over to his car and he opened the trunk and there was a calf. A little baby calf. And I was amazed. So my dad and this guy got the calf out of the trunk and we took it into the car -- ah, into the barn, into where the cows were. And I thought that that was how you got calves, some guy brings them in the trunk of his car. I don't know the circumstances of that. Maybe we had a cow that had had a calf that had died and -- I don't know. I -- my dad does not remember this at all. So anyway, sometime after that, my dad said to me, "The next couple of days, we're gonna have a new calf." And I thought, "Great!" And man, I watched for that guy in his car to bring that calf. I watched every car that went by. And this was, you know, we lived on a dirt road. Not many cars went by. So every car that went by, I looked at it hopefully that maybe this was the guy bringing us the calf. So, one morning when Dad -- when my dad said, "Oh, we had a new calf, got the new calf last-" or, "We had a new calf last night," I was so disappointed that I hadn't been there to see the guy bring us this calf. And I have no idea how long this thought persisted that this is the way you get calves is a guy brings them in a car, I have no idea. But you know, that's what I thought at the time.

What's the difference between tennis shoes and sneakers? And that one is a little trickier, just because where I grew up it wasn't particularly unusual to have those essentially be synonyms. And what I mean by that is, quite often, your sneakers would be what you might wear to play tennis on a court, especially, if you weren't, say, using basketball shoes or more stylized kind of sneakers and sneaker designs. Tennis shoe designs were maybe a little more basic 30-40 years ago. So, it wasn't necessarily uncommon to have sneakers being sold as the same kind of tennis shoes that John McEnroe or Chris Evert or Jimmy Connors might have an endorsement deal for. Especially you remember, you know,  Converse having both basketball style shoes and tennis slash sneaker style. I think there was like a Jimmy Connors model or some such might have been Converse, he might have had a deal with another brand, but for a long time, were quite interchangeable.

My teacher that I work mostly with is having a lot of problems with, with one of the new hires, and every time the administration comes in to observe this person, they do exactly what they're supposed to do. And when they, they are not being observed, then they just really don't do anything and they sit on the phone and they don't really help kids and, you know, they'll do what they're forced to do, but they just don't -- they're just inactive. So, this person -- so, this person got observed several times and he did not know that he was going to be observed. But when the administrator showed up he instantly got up and did what he was supposed to do. And my friend, the teacher I work with, when I -- I caught her later on that day, and when nobody else was there in the room, and she said, "I yelled at him today." And I'm like, "Well, why did you yell at him?" And she said, "I told him you do exactly what you are supposed to do, you do a really good job, when you're being observed. But when you are not being observed, then you, then you, you don't. I need you to step up and, and do what you're supposed to do all the time, not just when you're being observed." And she was just falling apart with guilt and she was so upset because, because she doesn't like being mean. She doesn't like to be that supervisor and it's a hard conversation, but she kind of did it out of anger and frustration without really planning it. So, a couple days later, when I was talking to her -- well, I told her at that time, when she told me, I said, "It's okay to be clear. You, you are doing him a favor. You don't need to feel guilty because what do you -- what's going to be the result if you don't? He's gonna get fired. He's gonna get transferred. Or it'll just be an awful work situation, and you'll talk behind his back. But you're -- if you don't talk to him, that's not fair to him." So, I, I keep using the expression "clear is kind" that comes from Brené Brown because, you know, you have to have those difficult conversations. So, a few days…

Okay so I used to have this skirt that looked like a skirt from a kindergarten teacher. It was like a jean, a denim skirt, and it had like an apple -- it had like some fruits that had been cut from a different color fabric. Like, I don't think it was felt, but it was like different colored fabric had been cut into the shape of fruits and then sewn onto the bottom of it, so it looked like it had a little fruit basket at the bottom. It was very homemade looking and I found it at a thrift store and I thought it was really ugly, and of course, that -- when I find something that's like uniquely ugly and hideous, like, I want to wear it. So I was wearing it. And I knew I just looked really stupid. And I don't know why but I really like that. I like to look stupid. And I was wearing it, and I went, I went to a restaurant and I was standing in line at this -- like, the counter and there was like a man there and he looked like he was like a construction worker type of a guy. And he looked at me with like scoffing, like ridicule in his face, and he goes, "What are you, a kindergarten teacher?" And I'm just like, "No, I work, I work in a bookstore." He was like, "Huh. Well your skirt looks like a kindergarten teacher." I was like, "Well, okay." And then I kind of just ignored him. And the way he said it, with like disdain, I was like, "Oh, oh, man." Like, "I'm so embarrassed." He's -- like, I knew I looked dumb, but like, he's over here pointing it out and like, that's not cool. Like I'm supposed to be subtly dumb-looking not like obviously dumb-looking. And not, not that being a kindergarten teacher is dumb. You know, what the hell? Um, I have nothing against kindergarten teachers, but like, the way he said it made me feel really stupid. And so I like never wore that skirt again ever. Yeah. Thanks, dude. Made me feel really dumb.

When I was probably in second or third grade, my dad had just moved to an apartment that had a dishwasher, previous apartment was all hand-wash and I mean like just moved probably within a week or two. And I was there visiting and his girlfriend lived with him at the time A.K.A. soon to-be-fiancé. I can't remember where they were in their progress there but, my dad was gonna go out and run some errands with my brother and before he left, he turned to my stepmom and said one way or another basically was like, "All right. Heading out. Do not use the dishwasher. We don't have the right soap for it. You can't use dish soap. Don't. Run. The dishwasher." So my dad left and almost just like a, like a, was gonna say like a movie but almost like a Curious George book in a way. The minute he left my stepmom was like, "You, you want to try the dishwasher?" And second or third grade me was like, "Yeah let's see if it works. That sounds fun." And so we went over to the island where the dishwasher was in the kitchen you had to the walk around the edge and you know dishwashers on the opposite side, from the living room, facing the opposite wall so you can't see the dishwasher from the television. And she went ahead and made sure that thing was loaded up, put a little bit of dish soap in there and let it loose. And came back over and we watched television for a bit. And then she's like, "I'm gonna go ahead and uh, I probably should check and see how things are going. Make sure everything's okay."  And she went over, around the island to the opposite side to check on the dishwasher. I don't remember what she said, but there was, she was aghast. Probably something like, "Oh my God," something very similar. I was like "What?" and I came skittering over. And there were like, bubbles waist high just forming in this very narrow kitchen between the island and the opposite wall. We found out really quickly why you don't use dish soap in the dishwasher. We had a real problem on our hands. We didn't panic but my stepmom's like, "Oh my God, I'm so dead. This is a problem."  And so we tried…

And I'm going to talk about hats, I love hats! I'm so glad you thought of that subject because that's one of my favorite things is hats. I have lots of hats, in fact, after I saw that, I wonder how many hats I have, and I went around and counted my various stashes of hats, and I have between 40 and 45 hats and I love wearing hats. And right now, I'm wearing my winter hats. I have about eight winter hats, some of them are dressier than others but there is no stocking caps among my winter hats. Oh I take that back. There is one stocking cap. I do not wear it but it is one that was made for me by a friend, probably fifty-some years ago and I call it my life saving hat because I was wearing it on a dark stormy night. It was January 2nd of 1973. I was walking home from work in Eaton Rapids and crossing the street and I got hit by a car, but he said that he swerved at the last minute because he saw my yellow hat, and that he didn't hit me full on because of that and I was I was not killed obviously because here I am, I was injured but not killed. And so, anyway, that's the only stocking cap I have.