Happiness and Its Constituents

In high school I was selected for the Who’s Who of American High School Students. I had to provide the publishers a photo and a list of my accomplishments. I listed one of my high school activities as “Row Captain” because in my eleventh-grade English class I sat in the front and was solely responsible for not only passing papers back to the other students in my row, but also collecting papers from my row to hand to our teacher. I took the position seriously, and if I did not receive enough papers for everyone in my row, I quickly alerted the teacher of her counting error. If a student in my row did not pass forward an assignment, then that student was probably going to be getting a wedgie in the hall after class.

I take fake jobs very seriously, and then I present them to the public-slash-authorities as both real and important. I feel like my self-proclaimed title of “Row Captain” is sort of like my self-proclaimed title of “Writer.” It is something that I claim with no actual authority, and that I will continue to do until someone tries to stop me. If you don’t like it, then I will see you in the hall, and I suggest you hold your panties down.

When I started this blog, I was in graduate school and in an unhappy marriage. I thought if I posted my writing for public consumption, then I would have a voice— something I desperately needed. On the day that I filed for divorce, I came home and printed out five essays and sent them for publication to The Funny Times. It was an attempt to do something productive. I hoped they would be interested in at least one. They were interested in all five and asked for more. Since then I have been regularly featured, and I continue to write in this space as a way of trying out material and reaching a varied audience.

Some of the essays on this site have been previously published and some are original to this site. Before I was first published, I knew that if I was going to succeed as a writer, then I would have to allow myself to be embarrassingly honest in my writing. I like to think of what I do as writing naked. Enjoy and read at your own risk.

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