sarahhatterdotcom

Life Hangs Like A Noose.

Since September 22, 2004, Jason and I have dreamed of moving to Casey, Iowa. Going to Casey wasn't something we had planned, it just happened, the same way that you live your life oblivious to someone else and then suddenly realize you're in love with them. We were just driving, and suddenly, we were in love with Casey, Iowa.
We'd just stopped in Dixon, IL, the childhood home of President Regan, and before that we'd had breakfast in DeKalb, where Cindy Crawford went to college. It was also in DeKalb that I realized I had no spare change to pay the automatic toll booth its lousy $.10, so we managed to sneak around the pay lane and expected the highway patrol to pull us over immediately. They didn't, so we kept driving.

We drove through Jason's mother's hometown, past the border of Illinois into the quad cities, and six hours after we left Chicago we saw a hillside off the freeway. We looked at each other and made a silent agreement that we had to stop and make our way to that hillside, so I slammed on my brakes and pulled my car across three lanes of I-80. Right off the on-ramp, down a two-lane paved road until it turned to dirt, and another right onto Cemetery Road, up the hill to unforeseen gravestones.

When we mounded that hill we found Casey, a town of 478 people and 13.7 square miles of green hills and blue sky. We stood atop that same hill that we'd seen from the highway, staring down upon the red rooftops of farmhouses that dotted the fields below us, and together we breathed in deep, memorizing every detail. And an hour later, after taking a hundred pictures on our fancy digital cameras, we got back in my car and Jason drove back down on I-80 while I uploaded our photos to my iBook and the iPod played Johnny Cash. We'd stepped out of our digital lives for one small hour to stand eye level with God, and just as quickly we stepped back into the car.

Since then, almost two years, we've talked about Casey every day. Casey is our ideal, much like tired businessmen joke of retiring in Fiji, Jason and I joke of buying a farm in Casey. But even in our joking we're very serious, knowing one day when our websites are obsolete and we're no longer entertaining digital customers, when our online lifestyles run us ragged and we're gasping for virtual air, we know someday we'll buy a farm in Casey. That's why sometimes, when we're bored or almost insane with frustration, we'll browse real estate listings in Casey, and nearby Adiar County, Iowa.

There is something about this little farm town in Iowa that tethers me and keeps its claws dug deep into my soul. I close my eyes and see it; I turn my head while driving down the desolate commute to San Francisco and I see Casey like the Virgin Mary before me, I blink and it's gone. What makes a thing or a person or a place drive its memory into the minds of someone? Is it nostalgia, or is it hope, or is it faith? Or is it fate.

Last night while Jason and I talked again of moving to Casey and buying that farm on the hillside, while browsing again those real estate listings and joking of the possibility, something suddenly caught my eye. It was something I'd seen before but had never remembered until then, something so sharp it made me stop everything to figure it out. And then I remembered, while reading the listing for the 4 bedroom restored farmhouse on 15 acres, listed at $45,000 by motivated sellers, the words, "Adair County."

And I went to my bookcase and found the manuscript of the autobiography of my great grandfather, a traveling minister who toured the Mid-West hosting big tent revivals from 1887 until he died in 1936. My family inhereted it when my grandfather died five years ago, and since then it has sat on the shelf, waiting until we knew what to do with it.

I flipped the pages until I saw at the bottom of one, typed on his rickety typewriter while he rested on his deathbed, the words, "I then went to Adair, where we raised the first Community Church and dedicated it. I suppose it still stands there to this day."

This Time I'm Speeding With No Direction.

A few months ago, we launched the tiny little website of our new company, Misc. Books and Press. The first book we're publishing is an anthology of great online writing and we're currently knee deep in submissions, legal notices, licenses and rejection letters. Some designer friends of ours sends us big zip files every now and then and inside are drafts of book covers and page formats, and ideas for which font to use.

It's all great and wonderful, but job nowadays is to read weblogs, lots of them, the few good ones and the many horrible, awful, depressing and bad ones. I sift through them word for word looking for something and I don't even know what it is I'm looking for. I've distanced myself so much from reading about the lives of strangers that sometimes I feel like I've forgotten how to do it.

Five years ago when I started this site, I talked to the whole wide web like we were the very best of friends. I named names, I posted pictures, I even posted my voice mail number - a few times - and invited people to reach out to me. These strangers who read my words became friends and we had long conversations over email and instant messages, and every now and then we'd meet in real life for a beer or two and talk about how strange it is that we ever met.

We never should have met, that's what strikes me as so wonderfully strange, these friends I have I never should have met. We never should have known a thing about each other, I should never know their names, and yet I do because we all decided at the same time to talk about our lives online. That's what once seemed miraculous about these lives we have online, and yet in the shuffle of things I've lost my wonder for it.

Five years later I'm much more removed from that frame of mind. I love the emails I get from strangers, but I don't have the time to be penpals with people in Malaysia. I appreciate the compliments, but it's creepy to me having strangers ogle my self portrait so I rarely post pictures of myself anymore. The insight people share to my writing is flattering, but I don't write for validation from anyone.

Five years later I'm not just a weblogger, I'm not even just a writer anymore. In 6 weeks I'll be a publisher, someone who publishes books, printed on paper and bound with threads, glued to a cardstock cover with a bar code etched to the back. I became liberated publishing my life online, and because I did so I became guarded, and out of that I'm trying to be less guarded about everything. To take more risks. To be more approachable, and to approach more people. This is the process of taking control of my creative life, and the creative lives of 34 other people. We're all in this together, we're a team and we're unified and if this fails it's all my fault.

But I tell myself it's not going to fail, and I have no doubts ever. This is what I'm supposed to do with my life, probably the whole reason I got involved in writing online all that time ago. My co-publisher and partner in this event and I are giddy with our good luck and foresight. We can't believe how great this is all going to be and our excitement slightly borders on recklessness, I'll admit just this once. It's an excitement I haven't felt in a long time, a joy to discover the lives of people I never otherwise should know about.

Five years later I'm feeling the same way again, just like when I started.

Right Or Wrong, There Is No Home Without You

The saddest part of any human existence is having life-splitting great news to share, and everyone you love replying with, "I'm busy right now, talk to you later."

It is a sadness that breaches pain and death and the implosion of the entire unviverse, and will stop a soul in its tracks to catch its breath. It is a sadness that is founded in nothing but selfish excitement, and is given up quickly at the thought that perhaps the news wasn't so great after all.

I'm Bound By The Feeling, So Easy To Fake.

When I was in 6th grade my teacher made me stay in during recess. She told me that she had a proposal for me, that she'd recently acquired a new Macintosh computer for the classroom and something it had on it was this word processing software, and she wanted to know if I'd like to use it to write stories on. I said yes, that I would like that, because she happened to say I could do this during class while the other kids were learning how to use apostrophes, and that bored me endlessly. So I sat there during 5th and 6th periods, writing away furiously, making up stories that rivaled Sweet Valley High melodramas, and I'd print them out each day and let my teacher read them.

This happened in high school, too. Over and over again, teachers would pull me aside to tell me to focus on writing. It got to the point where I was a 15 year old sitting in English 1A at the local college writing papers on Walden and being mentored into a career as a writer that I never knew I wanted. Because until then I wanted to be an artist, I painted constantly and displayed my work in galleries. I applied to art schools, I took honors art classes, I won awards. All the while I excelled in English and journalism because it was easy for me, not because I thought I should be a writer.

I don't know how things changed. It could have been that in the end of it all I wasn't a good painter. It could have been that nothing seemed to satisfy me the way writing did. It could have been that people just keep telling me I was good at it, and that taunted something inside me until I couldn't help but agree with them. In an instant my focus shifted from what I'd always wanted to do in life to what suddenly seemed like something I could do better.

My life, since then, has been a struggle to do for a living what I'm good at and what I love doing. Where do you start? How do you get your foot in the door? What should I do to establish myself when I refuse by the power of God to write food reviews as a stepping stone? This week I made a big leap by quitting the banal and unproductive job I've had for the past 6 months to focus on doing what I love, what I'm good at, and today I get an email from a friend that reads, "If you don't sincerely care for the job you're doing, you won't do it well."

I'm not bringing this up brag about my triumphant youth, or to highlight adolescent accomplishment with the bitter scorn of an unsuccessful adult. It's simply fact, fact that set my feet to flight and has left me where I am today. The point was I cared about painting, but I didn't do it well. I didn't care about writing, but somehow I still managed to do it well enough to convince people that I did care.

That I do care.

You will not do it well if you don't care for it. Not if you don't like it, not if you aren't inspired by it, but if you don't care sincerely for what you're doing. This means every stroke on my keyboard needs to be intentional, each word needs to be chosen and each edit I make has to be done with caution and care. I remember this every time I am snagged on a sentence or a statement or a word, I say, "Wait a minute, what's my point here anyway? Why does this even matter?"

The majority of the time it doesn't matter. Because I don't care about it. There is no point because I haven't given it a point, I haven't empowered my words with meaning because I haven't cared to. I've just let those teachers convince me this is what I'm supposed to do, this is what  need to say, click click click, publish, the end. Sometimes I find myself secretly just wishing I could be out at recess, instead of sitting here coming up with something to convince people that I care when I sincerely don't.

But when I do care, everything in the world is different, it is new and clear and alive to me. Black is blacker and blue is bluer and they rest peacefully against a white that is whiter than life itself. When I care, my soul takes over and I end up composing paragraphs and sending them to people, and they write me back, "Yes, this is it."

And it is those words that keep me going and keep me caring about what I create. The slightest encouragement every artist thirsts for is like pulling a toothpick out from under a large boulder and setting it into motion down the hill. The push creates a surge of inertia that propels it with great speed, defying gravity and space and time and physics to finally rest somewhere so separate from where it started you wonder, How did that happen?

"If you asked random people on the street if they'd like to be able to draw like Leonardo, you'd find most would say something like "Oh, I can't draw." This is more a statement of intention than fact; it means, I'm not going to try. Because the fact is, if you took a random person off the street and somehow got them to work as hard as they possibly could at drawing for the next twenty years, they'd get surprisingly far. But it would require a great moral effort; it would mean staring failure in the eye every day for years. And so to protect themselves people say "I can't."

To Hold You In The Bible-Black Predawn.

Photo by Jason Fried, 9/22/04

Rest in peace, H. Ballard Harris. I am a lucky person, if only to have met him.

In the middle of nowhere we run into Ballard Harris, sitting outside the service station he once ran, watching the traffic go by. The station has been closed for many a long year, and the former cowboy and pump attendant is now 90 years old, but he still has sharp eyes and ears. It was Harris that Johnny Cash sang about in Cisco Clifton’s Fillin’ Station. Cisco is about the only place on Highway 128; the place where Harris used to work, many years ago. “Pollution every which way you look – where’s it going to end?” he asks over and over in his croaky voice, shaking his head beneath his giant Stetson as another big SUV storms past his rusty, broken Texaco sign. “Something’s gotta change. At least that’s what I pray for every day.” Harris has pasted the outside walls of the tumbledown filling station with quotes from the Bible in the hope that passers-by will read them and maybe change their ways.

--Steffan Heuer

Taxi Cabs Were Driving Me Around.

Every month I go through the tedious exercise of updating my archive pages by hand. I code all those extra pages by hand in basic HTML and CSS. I copy this here and paste it over here and replace "September" with "October" and "09" with "10" and suddenly a whole new month is born, full of words I've chosen to "publish" here. With the slide of a few fingers across a few letters on a keyboard I concede with this symbolic gesture that this is my life happening month by month, and I've done nothing as of yet to change it. Sometimes those archive links I make catalog one post in just as many months, sometimes more. I suppose it all depends on how much of my life revolves around just one more month in the same spot.

And that's always what brings me back to the same thought: It's difficult to say just how or when the city died to me. Perhaps it was the first time I left, again I don't really remember, but at any rate it has been dead - buried really - for what seems like an eternity now. Where I once felt the hot breath of a city on fire panting against my neck I now hear the pale wheezing of a place I know far to well for it to be exotic to me any longer. It's like when you first heard Dick Clark or Kathy Lee Gifford say, "Nothin but a G thang," and you realized the whole gangsta rap phase had totally run its course. Dr. Dre might as well be doing the Macarena on live TV.

Familiarity is something that kills even the best relationships. The sweet way a girl sighs in her sleep becomes this annoying manifestation of everything she's ever done wrong. His adorable feet curled up on the sofa morph unexpectedly into dirty, inconvenient feet lying there, messing up the room it took so long for you to clean, just like how he interrupts people at dinner with his stupid stories from college when obviously no one cares.  "It didn't used to be like this," you think to yourself, remembering the first time that sigh left those lips, the first time you swooned at those feet tucked up under the blanket.

It didn't used to be like this, that wasn't always there, before it was a Rite Aid I remember it being a vacant lot where people would paint community murals on the wall. It was art! It was passion! And now it's just another multi-level parking garage, another clumsy reminder of commercialization of this city, of people needing convenience all the time for everything. There are cameras in our phones and iPods in vending machines and we don't remember anything anymore because we've got it saved on our hard drives that we back up on our flash drives and in case that fails we have a backup drive that we sync with our cell phones so its all right here always.

I'm gonna be late but it's ok because I can text you and you're running late too, so it's not even a problem anymore because we've both figured that our individual time was more important than each others, so we're canceling out our self-centeredness so long as we're both late and we both know it. You are nothing to me but an entry in my address book, and by the way do I have your current address to send a Christmas card to? Sure we haven't spoken in months, but here's some holiday greetings just the same, isn't my new wireless printer amazing? It's new but I'm getting a newer one soon.

Maybe the city hasn't changed, maybe I have. Maybe it's always been like this, maybe it's always been detached and compartmentalized and void of emotion, or maybe it's far less metaphysical than that all together. Maybe what it really is isn't just people who've gotten caught in the ever-moving tide of the future with all its ebbs and troughs, but people who are responsible for reversing the tide of things. Again and again and again. It's people who've said, "I wish I were able to do this..." and then they've gone out and done it, they've made it happen with code and computers and technology. They've been tagged on the playground by God and he's spoken to them, "You're it."

They can do anything they want with the technology at their fingertips, but are we better for it, or are we just more consumed?

We get to this point sometimes in life where we really believe that pretty soon everything is just going to come together. The way I feel here is  piece of a giant puzzle that will somehow find its own way to connect into this even greater expanse of connectedness, and it will all come together in the end. The way I've been this past year, these months joined one by one on a white sheet full of HTML, this will all come together somehow soon, perhaps for the greater good of it all. Perhaps not. But at this point I've been keeping this catalog of months to come back to and review like old photographs, except why does it feel like every pose is exactly the same?

Nothing's changed. I've grown complacent, I'm annoyed and ill at ease in this city and this place and I've done nothing to change. Things haven't just come together like I always thought they would, instead things have moved further and farther apart, and I haven't done a single thing about it but stand here and marvel at the ever-growing expanse between what I intended this life to be like and what it's turning into.

And to top it all off, you can't do anything here anymore without fearing that someone will sue you or threaten to sue you or remind you there's a possibility that if you do that you could very well be sued. Is my car parked too close to theirs? Did I grab her coat on my way out of the bar by mistake? Is he upset that I didn't want a second date and will he take me to court now for not fulfilling some obligation I drunkenly agreed to? There's no freedom here anymore, no room to make any mistakes, just like the second year of dating someone you know isn't good for you but you just don't feel like breaking up with. That fear sets in of the inevitable, and instead of admitting it we just deny it as long as we can and make up lie after lie about where we were, what we were doing, why we were talking to this person, what does it mean??

It's almost like this place is fully aware of all its many, many flaws. It knows rent is too high, it knows traffic is a nightmare, it knows everyone is too uptight for their own good. It's on those fears that it reacts to every single thing that happens, perpetuating this tension fingering itself through the streets, deep as fault lines. Is it the people or this place? Is it them or me? Is it really just me?

Regardless, I can't bear the thought of creating 12 more month archive links and have nothing to show for it except some copied-and-pasted code. So with that said, in a few months I'll be moving to Chicago. I suppose there's nothing else left to say about it.

Long And Long And Longer It Takes.

For a long while I've been thinking about taking an advanced digital photography class next semester. To enroll in this class at a private, somewhat exclusive art school, I have to have my work evaluated by two professors and then write a brief essay that examines my personal beliefs about photography. My personal beliefs are that people are not nearly as interesting as their surroundings, and that's why I don't take pictures of people.

If only it were that simple.

It's not that I don't find people interesting, because I do, really. But I find people's surroundings a lot more interesting than people could ever be, and so I've unfortunately paid attention to things other than, well, people. I maybe have three good shots with a person in them, but the rest are landscapes, sunsets, macros of street signs or pool tables. Juvenile stuff really, which is exaclty why I'm taking this class, so I can figure out how to do something I'm not good at. I was asked by the director of this photography program, "What are your strengths in photographing subjects?" My reply was, "I guess my strength is that I try not to have a subject."

This is not a profound statement, but it's telling nonetheless. I can take this one little sentence and unfold it out atop the landscape of my entire life like a picnic blanket on a dry, grassy hill. It's a setting but it's also a catalyst for so many other things. In subtle yet deliberate words it encompasses my entire adult life, I try not to have a subject. In other words, I don't set my sights on just one thing in particular. In other words, I have no idea what the fuck I'm doing.

But the difference between me and most people who have no idea what the fuck they're doing is that I go to great lengths to seem like I know exactly what the fuck it is I'm doing. Even when applying to be in a class to learn something about a subject I am not an expert in, I provide my prospective evaluators with a professional looking portfolio of photographs chosen in an painstaking process of color charts and spreadsheets and vector levels. I do this because there's a myth I believe about confidence and self-assuredness that I hear whispered to me, "Fake it until you've got it and everyone will go along with you."

If it were only that simple.

The thing is I'm pretty proud of some of my photographs, but not the ones I spent hours and hours seeking out and framing and planning for. I'm proud of the ones I took slip-shod, the ones that were borne of a quick reflex and a lucky second. I'm surprised by and maybe even baffled by the moments that were just right when I wasn't, the ones that I had no idea I'd just captured. I feel lucky, and privileged even, to go back through my photos and see things that just take my breath away every time I look at them, and I think maybe it's those little things we get without giving anything that are what make up real confidence and real self-assuredness somewhere down the line.

I just want to whisper to myself, "If only it were that simple."

It will Help Us Ev'ry Day, It Will Brighten All The Way.

One of the best things about my new job is that my office is directly across from the venue for the California State Fair. Long time readers know that I have a love/hate relationship with the fair*, mostly because I love the fair and I hate myself for it. I spent years and years attempting to class myself up by studying art history and reading Schopenhauer and Sartre, but deep down in my soul I’m always going to be that girl who grew up on a dirt road and used to dress up like Laura Ingalls Wilder and walk to the Circle K, pretending all the while that I was going to the general store to buy Pa his tabaccy. I am suffused with the disgusting habits of my hillbilly roots, which include a devastating magnetic attraction to all things fair.

I have only been to the State Fair four times in my life, all after I turned 20 years old. For some reason, the belief of my family was that the State Fair was not a place for children, and thus my brother and I stayed at home during long summer nights when my parents would go to the fair and trek back with arm-fulls of Ginsu knives and apple core-ers and the occasional set of extra large chip clips. For years and years I perpetuated this mythic ideal of what the State Fair was all about, images of blue cotton candy and foot-long corn dogs dancing in my head. When I finally made it there myself to partake in the wonder of the Midway, I was sorely disappointed to find there was only one corn dog stand in the entire park, and it was circled by a long line of enormous fat women in cut off shorts and their unkempt children, their faces smeared with the melted remnants of dipped ice cream cones and Hawaiian punch. The glory of it all.

Since then, my State Fair experiences create a collage of interesting and disappointing moments over the course of my college years. There was the time I got hypnotized, the time I ate a fried Twinkie, the time I went with this stupid group of people from church and one stupid girl pouted *the entire time* because one of the guys with us talked to me more than he talked to her. That was an awful night. She was an awful girl. All I can remember about her is she pouted all the time about anything she could think to pout about, and she ruined that one Fair experience for everyone. I try so hard to forget her, but there she is in my memories of the Fair, the vision of her standing there with arms folded curtly scorched in my retinas forever.

This year, my trip to the Fair has been long anticipated. Ever since I stepped back on Californian soil I've been wondering just when the day would come that I could buy my Poppy Pack of tickets and circle the parking lot for an hour to get a space and then stand in line in the hot sun while children swarmed around me screaming. Now that I'm working right across the street, I spend my mornings watching the horses being warmed up on the track across the street, preparing for cart racing later in the day. Afternoons I watch the cars pull in and out of the parking lot, a sea-change of people with stomachs full of sugar and hearts warm with beer. At night the lights of the ten-story Ferris wheel spin and glitter against the black sky, and you can hear the screams of its terrified passengers echo on the stars. I say to myself softly, "I'm going to the fair on Thursday. I am going to the fair on Thursday!"

Tomorrow my exodus begins, I pray for the strength to consume all the Fair food I can. Having spent the last two years living out of California, I can only imagine the ways my heart will leap once I set foot in the fairgrounds again. It's as if the mothership has landed, beckoning me back to her loving arms.

* I once wrote a letter to the Govenor lamenting the sparce corn dog stands at the State fair. His office replied with a kindly worded form letter, and free tickets to the next year's fair.

When All Of Your Roses Have Died.

One of my first office jobs was during my freshman year of college, answering phones for the tenants of a big office complex. Answering phones for all the tenants in the whole building, over and over and over again. All day I answered phones, for this office and that office, telling the callers So-and-So will be out all day, can I transfer you to their voice mail, are you able to hold, are you able to hold? This was an annoyingly repetitive job that bored me senselessly, to the point where I could work an eight hour day and have no recollection of anything I had done. This job was great for doing things like scrap-booking, reading magazines, and watching the second-hand on the clock tick-tock itself into oblivion.

Regardless of how mind-numbing that job may have been, it paid for my classes and my first car. And because of the years I spent putting calls on hold and copying letters, I know how to change my Windows font effects to clear text so they appear like Mac fonts on the screen. I know how to enable multiple-party rules in Outlook, I know how to collate and staple double-faced documents on a copy machine, I know how to change the toner in a fax machine, and I know how to transfer a call to voice mail. And because of that job and the jobs in other offices that I've had in the past ten years, I also know how to properly affix a paperclip to a document.

You may think that this is an entirely benign bit of information, but coupled with a proper letter folding technique you will find that paperclip positioning is actually one of the most important skills a modern-day office worker could master! Imagine if you will a paperclip placed horizontally on a document versus one placed in the opposite direction. It is easy to determine which document will hold together best.

Using a paperclip to affix a document has all kinds of benefits. Besides the reduced cost compared to using staples and the cost of time spent removing said staples in the event the document should need to be separated, paper clips can also be reused on future documents. The most efficient way to affix a paperclip to a document is to place it tilted slightly to the right, not directly vertical or horizontal as that could cause the paper to tuck under the paperclip if it were ever folded. Also, it’s a lot better if you affix the long end of the paperclip to the back of the page because THAT ADDS MORE STABILITY TO THE DOCUMENT SO THE PAGES AREN’T FLOPPING OVER IN THE READER'S HANDS. What could possibly be more important in the lives of corporate workers than the stability of paper-clipped documents!? YOU TELL ME!!

On a beautiful summer day when the sun was glowing in a cloudless sky, twenty five minutes of my own personal life was obliterated while I was taught how to correctly affix a paperclip to a document. Too dumbfounded to really protest the emphatic office supply training I was receiving, I had little to do besides nod my head and mumble, “Ok, I see, so that’s how you do it,” after a demonstration of correct and incorrect paperclip affixing. In an average office environment, that kind of needless busy work amounts to about $160 a week, to $640 a month, to $7, 680 a year spent on training people how to properly affix paperclips to documents.

And people wonder why I *hate* office environments so much. It’s not because I don’t like working, it’s not because I have some aversion to working as a team, it’s just the wastefulness of time and energy that goes on in every cube farm in every office every day. Human beings can scale mountains, they can write and paint and sculpt things out of clay, they can build highways and online interfaces! And yet the majority of us spend our adult lives under the heat of halogen lamps, cooking like hot dogs on a gas station rotisserie while we correctly affix paperclips to boring, inconsequential documents.

But such is life, or so they say. I just hope that one day, when all this nonsense of earth and humans and their little plans comes to an end, when this world full of people trapped in office complexes is taken into the hands of God, I hope that he turns it on its end and shakes all the loose office supplies and middle managers into the depths of hell. I'm sure, however, that none of my documents will come undone, having been properly secured all these years.

Tangerine Trees And Marmalade Skies.

Just about every sitcom I watched when I was growing up had an episode where one of the character's crazy siblings comes to stay with them for a few days. On Family Ties, the role of the carefree brother to Elise Keaton was played by Tom Hanks. On Charles In Charge, it was Buddy’s alcoholic sister Bunny, played by the incomparable Mindy Cohn. All of these characters were the same: they swooped into town unannounced, they took the kids to some extravagant event that interfered with their bedtime/dinner time/homework time, and they each left with their tails between their legs after being scolded for not growing up and settling down already and having a family of their own.

Then they’d pack up their nylon duffle bag and leave quietly after a reconciliatory hug, and the end credits would roll, never to list their name again. The family would go back to doing their family things while the headstrong and free-willed aunt or uncle or cousin went back to being their wayward self. These episodes were always the ones that resonated with me.

Since I was 20 or so, I’ve had a paralyzing fear of becoming crazy Aunt Sarah. For a few years, I even threw myself into relationships that had the possibility of ending in marriage because I was so afraid of being 25, 26, 27 and not being married. Everyone I knew was getting married or getting engaged or getting pregnant because that was what they were destined for, while I battled the monster feelings in my stomach telling me that I was destined for something completely different. I can't remember a time when I didn't picture myself unmarried and living in a city by myself, and yet I've spent all of my adulthood attempting to pacify those feelings and sink myself into a monogamous "normal" suburban life.

Today, on the eve of my birthday that officialy ushers in my late-20's, I’ve made peace with those feelings. Deep inside me I am at peace with not being bound for that kind of life. What I really want is to live in a big city, to not own a car, to have a house with modern furniture that is decidedly not kid-friendly. I don’t want to plan my vacations around summer break or spring break or winter break or fall break, I just want to pack a bag and leave. My ovaries do not talk to me, ever. They never say to me, “Don’t you want to grow a human being in your stomach and then push it out of your vagina so it can grow up and hate you?” They simply never talk to me.

The problem here is that people who get married and have children are rewarded by their friends for finding someone to shack up with and perpetuating picture-book society. They get showered with gifts for their kitchens and homes and people praise them with offerings of measuring cups and bath towels. But people who stay single - by choice or perhaps cruel coincidence - are rarely gifted with things that bless our homes; we get books and movies and luggage tags and jewelry. No one gets us mixing bowls or highball glasses or candlesticks from Tiffany. What on earth would I ever do with candlesticks from Tiffany? I’m single for God’s sake! I shouldn’t even be allowed to purchase candles let alone sticks to put them in! The horror that I would request such a thing!!

If we want a nice set of nesting bowls in a gorgeous red color, we have to go buy them ourselves because no one is ever going to buy us nesting bowls. If we happen to see some great flatware or a lovely vase, we have to go buy them ourselves because no one is ever going to buy us flatware or a fucking vase unless we have a ring on our finger or a child in our womb. People buy us vapid self-help books and ask us repeatedly when we’re going to settle down already, never thinking that perhaps our lives are as settled as we want them to be.

I’ve had things on my Amazon wishlist for years and years that have never been purchased for me. Stainless steel measuring cups, those nesting bowls, a 5-quart Kitchenaid in the tangerine color. Fed up with getting book after book after book when all I really wanted was a few really nice cookie sheets, I decided to go through my wishlist and remove all those things no one will ever buy me. I resolved that I'll just stop expecting people to get me those things all together and be grateful if they get me anything at all. Then yesterday an enormous box arrived on my doorstep and inside was a sweet card and a 5-quart Kitchenaid in tangerine.

And the best part about getting a Kitchenaid for my birthday, the thing that makes my heart sweep and swoon, is that I didn't buy it for myself. I've had it less than 24 hours and already I've made lemon poppy seed bread, cranberry almond cookies, and a chocolate roll that resembles and enormous ding dong and is overflowing with buttercream frosting made from scratch. I've even got all these attachments and matching spatulas and my head is spinning with all the things I can make. To some people, perhaps it's just a mixer. But it's more than that, it's a mixer that I've always been told I'd get when I was married.

I'm not married, I'm not interested in being married, I don't have children, I don't want children, I don't even like children. But that doesn't mean I can't be domestic or maternal, or bake up a mean apple pie. And now I have no reason not to.