25 Things About You

For everyone who has tagged me in that “25 Things About Me” Facebook meme.

1. You have a piece of spinach in your teeth. Here. No, your left. There.
2. Your mother’s first reaction upon discovering she was pregnant with you was “oh shit.”
3. This was also her second reaction.
4. The FBI file you fancy you have accumulated through a series of conventional and desultory protest activities does not exist.
5. Here is where your friends stopped reading.
6. Your father continued reluctantly to read, hoping to discover whether he had raised a daughter who would reveal in a public forum how and when she lost her virginity.
7. The professor who changed your life does not remember you.
8. Your son is not, as you fear, smoking pot. He is just stupid.
9. Your cat, who disapproves of your current boyfriend, has left an editorial comment in your shoe which you will not discover until too late.
10. You failed to notice when you reached the age at which risqué chatter about your own vagina stopped being sassy and alluring and became kind of gross.
11. Your deep, unspoken suspicion that a university degree was wasted on you is quite correct.
12. The Taco Bell Fiesta Salad you just ate exceeded the US Food and Drug Administration’s maximum allowable insect parts per gram by a factor of eleven.
13. You will fail to remark the humor when Facebook uses this information to serve you and your readers a series of Taco Bell ads.
14. A fondness for Merchant-Ivory films has left you with the erroneous belief that you are a fan of nineteenth-century fiction.
15. It would genuinely surprise you (but not your friends) to learn that Carrie is the most ancient text you have actually read.
16. “Momentarily” does not mean what you think it means, and your continual misuse of the word pains your precocious young daughter, who is nevertheless kind to you as she counts the days until she leaves for college and never returns.
17. Following your first act of physical love at 15, you returned home and wrote a tender, lyrical diary entry that your brother later found and incorporated into his stand-up comedy routine nearly verbatim (”a moment of pain, then blissful oneness / god I love him so much” could be relied upon to bring the house down).
18. Following your first act of physical love, your boyfriend rejoined his friends under the bleachers and collected $5 from each of them.
19. Here is where your father stopped reading.
20. Therefore he has yet to find out about the abortion.
21. Unless he attended one of your brother’s comedy shows.
22. The campy, effusive affection shown to you by your ex-husband’s boyfriend is purely sarcastic.
23. Coming up with twenty-five flattering and superficially revelatory things to say about yourself is the most fun you’ve had since finding the perfect Khalil Gibran quote to enhance your match.com profile.
24. It will be three more weeks before you discover the clever obscenity someone scrawled into the grime on the back of your mini-van. You won’t find it funny, but several hundred Flickr viewers will disagree.
25. Twenty years from now, your vague and almost entirely unexamined belief in Jesus will turn out to have absolutely no effect on your fate in the afterlife.