Not only did my parents not put any restrictions on what I read, my mother often gave me what others would consider clearly inappropriate reading material for a child. When I was nine, she gave me a copy of R.D. Laing's The Divided Self, a psychedelic take on schizophrenia. After this, it was no holds barred. When I was twelve or thirteen, I read the book Sybil (purloined from my mother's bedside books) about a woman with multiple personality disorder—this book was made into a rather cheesy tv melodrama with Sally Fields a few years later. Though by the time I read this book my attendance at school was already spotty, my mother did, in a rare moment of parental intervention, advise me that I not tell any of my teachers that I was reading this book.

When I begin something new, I start out as a clean desk and workspace person but very quickly devolve into a super-messy desk and floor person. I have one of those L-shaped desks, the surface of which is currently buried under papers, open books, and various sesame seed snap and lifesavers wrappers. Likewise, the floor to the right of me is covered with small stacks of books (every one of which I might need!), piles of paper that I'm always walking over and knocking into disarray, and a fair bit of hair. My "office," until recently the bedroom, has the mirror (and an outlet) that I use when I dry my hair. I'm always shaking stray hairs off my "floor" papers. The one upside is that the hairiness compels me to vacuum and tidy up often, after which I briefly recover my status as clean desk person. Everything is cyclical, I reassure myself.

I worry more that I won't wake up at all.

Though I have watched instructional videos of how to do this and pored over diagrams of how to do this, I would eventually like to figure out the correct way to fold a fitted sheet.