7. I’m terrible at gift-giving, which is sort of a test of how good you are at being a competent adult sufficient in sustaining relationships with other competent adults. I mean, even cats give gifts, even though their gifts are usually mouse carcasses, but at least they put some thought into it. The best I can do is an Applebee’s gift card I bought at CVS.

8. I’m fairly certain that there’s a dead mouse behind my bed, but I’m too afraid to move my mattress and confirm it, because as long as it’s not confirmed there’s at least a possibility that there isn’t a dead mouse lying inches away from my face while I sleep.

9. I’m self-destructive, but not in the dramatic way that drug addicts on CSI are. Like, I’ve never snorted cocaine off a stripper’s dick before, or any other body part for that matter. But I’m still slowly destroying myself. I routinely finish an entire box of soft-baked chocolate chip cookies in one sitting, and I haven’t exercised since one of the Bushes was president.

10. I don’t know what my bra size is.

ON MICHIGAN

My family was never a Disneyland family.

I always resented my classmates who belonged to Disneyland families, the haughty children who walked into class halfway through October and announced that they’d be missing school for an entire week while they gallivanted down to Florida to visit Cinderella and her whore sisters. “Have fun catching syphilis from Mickey Mouse,” I’d sneer under my breath, or at least that’s what I would have sneered if I’d known what syphilis was back then. To make it worse, those kids would always come back with Mickey Mouse–shaped water bottles and a week’s worth of gaudy themed T-shirts, just to remind everybody that going to Disneyland was not a onetime luxury, but a permanent promotion in status, lest anybody should forget.

My parents always gave my brother and me a litany of excuses as to why we’d never go to Disneyland, chief among them being that my mother refused to get on an airplane (and driving together for anything longer than a couple of hours at most was out of the question). I always found this excuse insufficient, considering that my mother had flown on airplanes before—twice, in fact—most recently to Hawaii, some twenty years earlier on her and my father’s honeymoon, and before then, as a haughty child herself, to none other than Disneyland. Perhaps she’d caught syphilis from Mickey Mouse, I thought. But more than likely she was simply a hypocrite.