To me, one of the mysteries of life is why life wants to be. Life is so much more biochemical work than chemical equilibrium, but still, staph desperately seeks that work. As do I, come to think of it. Staphylococcus doesn’t want to harm people. It doesn’t know about people. It just wants to be, like I want to go on, like that ivy wants to spread across the wall, occupying more and more of it. How much? As much as it can.

It’s not staph’s fault that it wants to be. Nonetheless, I give Staphylococcus aureus one star.

THE INTERNET

WHEN THE INTERNET FIRST CAME to our house in the early 1990s, so far as I could tell, the internet was inside of a box. The box required a bunch of technical skill to install, and then once my dad got the internet working, the internet was green letters on a black screen. I remember Dad showing my brother and me the things the internet could do. “Look,” he would say. “The internet can show you what the weather is like right now in Beijing.” Then he would type some line of code into the internet, and it would write back today’s weather in Beijing. “Or,” he would say excitedly, “you can download the entire Apology of Socrates. For free! And read it right here, in the house.”*

To my dad, this must have seemed like an actual miracle. But I was not a fan. For one thing, we couldn’t get phone calls while my dad was online, on account of how the internet used the phone lines. Admittedly, fourteen-year-old me wasn’t fielding a ton of calls, but still. More than that, it seemed to me that the internet was primarily a forum for talking about the internet—my dad would read (and tell us about) endless user manuals and message boards he’d read about how the internet worked, and what it might be able to do in the future, and so on.

One day, Dad showed me that on the internet, you could talk to real people all over the world. He explained, “You can practice your French by going to a French forum,” and he showed me how it worked. I messaged a couple people on the forum: “Comment ça va?” They responded in real time, with real French, which was unfortunate, as I didn’t know much French. I started wondering if there might be an English-language version of the service, and it turned out there was. In fact, there was one built just for me: the CompuServe Teen Forum.

On the CompuServe Teen Forum, nobody knew anything about me. They didn’t know that I was a miserable, cringingly awkward kid whose voice often creaked with nervousness. They didn’t know I was late to puberty, and they didn’t know the names people called me at school.

And paradoxically, because they didn’t know me, they knew me far better than anyone in my real life. I remember one evening, in an instant message conversation, I told my CompuServe friend Marie about the “night feeling.” The night feeling was my private name for the wave that crashed over me most school nights when I got into bed. My stomach would tighten and I’d feel the worry radiating out from my belly button. I’d never told anyone about the night feeling, and my heart was racing as I typed. Marie responded that she also knew the night feeling, and that she sometimes found comfort in listening quietly to her clock radio. I tried that, and it helped.