LIFE is a journey, made better with hydraulics.

LIFE. Not the one we’re living but the game, with all those damn pegs for kids. Mine always fell out of my little plastic play-piece car, which I secretly wished and pretended was a candy-paint, illegally tinted, souped-up lowrider 1960’s Impala. Instead, my first real ride was a white two-door manual 1984 Jetta, with purple tinted windows (only one opened, and all were peeling), a gas cap that whistled loudly on hot days (and, it seemed, especially when stopped at a stoplight next to cars with cute boys), and black vinyl seats I had to peel myself off in the summer every time I got out of that no-AC death trap. I later sold it – for all of $800 – to a kid from Española, New Mexico who very excitedly told me he was going to paint it, possibly with an image of the Virgin Mary, and then “slahm iiit and put rihms on iiit...!”

I think I cried. It was like I’d married off my first-born daughter to the perfect man.

The games people play. And the people those games play right back.

I'm an illogical, often irrational nut in real-life, but somehow I'm pretty decent at games of strategy and planning, like Battleship, Mastermind. Twister. Chutes and Ladders, too. Actually, I don't know about that last one, because I always believed you could and should run UP slides instead, which I think flat-out contradicts the rules of that game. I did it all the time anyway on the playground as a kid because it was more fun than going down those thick plastic slides that pumped your hair full of static and shocked the crap out of you the whole way down. What a dirty trick.

Capes, on the other hand, are one-size fits all.

I like my name. It's unique. I can 100% guarantee with little to no actual research or scientific fact, just general assumption, that no one in the world has my exact combination of First and Last-Last name. And in spite of the fact that my name caused momentary sadness as a kid when I would look for and never find a keychain or mug or other such pointless token of my existence to have my first name exactly as I spell it, or that the combination of names proved obnoxiously long when filling out scantron sheets for exams and I was still bubbling in the double Rs and double Zs of my double surname, while everyone else was well into the test, I feel I've grown to truly appreciate the cocktail. I do sometimes think my parents totally missed an amazing opportunity in not naming me Batman, though. I'd be famous, by now.

Surfing pre-school's wave on a cot.

I won the Bunny Hop in pre-school. I even got a t-shirt to commemorate my victory. The Bunny Hop involved an entire room of three year olds jumping around to music. Kid who hopped the longest was champ. Our teachers probably wanted to tire us the crap out so we'd nap. I don't think I had a clue as to their motives, I just wanted to get my feet a few centimeters off the ground. Repeatedly. That's probably about as far as I considered the purpose of the exercise. But boy, did I hop. On toes even. And hopped. Hopped all around that room and didn't stop until all the other kids collapsed in exhaustion and envy and then I kept right on hopping. I think my teachers finally had to tell me to stop with all the hopping and just nap already. I have yet to find where to apply this hopping skill in my adulthood. Went ahead and put it on my resume though.