This is the five-year plan I detailed to my college screenwriting teacher: 

I meet Zach Braff's sister (my five-year plan assumes he has a sister -- it does not include checking Wikipedia to see if this is actually the case) at a fine clothing retailer when we reach for the same shirt at the same time. The shirt looks better on me so she lets me have it. I then become best friends with her brother and, by extension, everyone in Hollywood. I parlay this friendship with everyone in Hollywood into a studio bidding war for the rights to my Rock Hudson biopic screenplay (which I have never written or even outlined), in which I would play the role of Doris Day. Upon the film's release, I win all of the awards, have a 5-page spread in Tiger Beat, and am interviewed by Jon Stewart, who kisses me on the cheek upon greeting me. I have to stop answering Zach Braff's texts to get him to leave me alone.

We are not far from the five-year anniversary of the expiration of that five-year plan. Here's my updated five-year plan:

I continue to wake up in the morning. I make enough money to feed my family and keep me in the finest contact lenses. I smile in pictures and in real life. Once a month, I might write something I'm proud of. I perform stand-up like three times a year; my coworkers refer to me as "basically a famous comedian" when clients visit. A thing I wrote in 2011 or something gets picked up and run by the Huffington Post or another aggregator. I do not receive monetary compensation for the piece. I tweet something at Trevor Noah and he favorites it but does not retweet it. Every year I consider starting a podcast, but I don't. Twice a year I consider starting a blog about podcasts, but I don't. My son makes it to his sixth birthday and doesn't even resent me much. He is a motivated, handsome, compassionate genius and has to stop answering Zach Braff's texts to get him to leave him alone.

Tonight my toddler fished a booger out of his nose all by himself for the first time!

Then he walked over to my dresser, opened my underwear drawer, dropped the booger in, closed the drawer, and strutted the fuck away, never to see that piece of snot again.

Someone I knew 15 years ago died suddenly yesterday.

To call him a friend would be a mis-characterization of our relationship and would trivialize the many full, dear friendships he did have in the impressive life he lived.
I knew him best in freshman year of high school. We sat at the same table at lunch. And we argued. Every day, we agreed to disagree, and we exchanged words, and we rolled our eyes at each other, and we laughed. We called each other terrible names that we didn't mean. We called each other terrible names that we did mean. And we smiled and gesticulated wildly and we thoroughly enjoyed each other's company. "Fighting" with him was often the highlight of my day. We respected and reviled each other.

After our lunch schedule changed, we fell out of touch. I didn't know him at all after high school, except for what I learned from Facebook, which seems to be an accurate account:
He was in law enforcement, a parole officer.
He had a wife and three boys under the age of three, whom he loved dearly.
He loved God and shared this love with others.

He and I have been Facebook friends for years, but I don't think we ever interacted -- not one Like, not one comment. We were still on opposite ends of the political spectrum and I had to force myself to refrain from arguing with him on more than one occasion. His opinions, though always expressed intelligently and diplomatically, made me angry -- not playful high-school-lunch angry, but irrational Internet angry. So I didn't engage. We were not friends.
Still, I watched his Facebook life in awe. He had a beautiful family for which he was demonstrably grateful, and I loved seeing pictures of his sons. He had grown into a father, a husband, and a proud public servant. He was a good man, and to hear his friends tell it, he was a Godly man.

I don't fully comprehend the sadness I feel. I valued him, but I didn't really know him. I don't even know if I liked him. But he was a good man and a friend to many, and his death is just flat-out unfair.
He touched my life more than I was conscious of. His ripples were far reaching. All of ours are.
I am so profoundly sad for his wife and children. Having a child, I can't help but try to imagine what she's going through, and even just the imagining is insufferable. I am sorry. I am sorry. I am sorry.

...

He filled a page in my freshman yearbook -- an epic poem in Sharpie -- full of swears, obscene inside jokes, and confusing stick figure drawings. And then, upon hearing that my mom might see it, he scribbled out the obscenities and replaced them with kind words. He was thoughtful like that.

PJs

My son is a giant. He ceased to be a baby the minute we switched from footie pajamas to 2-piece pajamas with monsters printed on them.
He's a little boy now, and I can't help but try to hold on, because it feels like it really wasn't that long ago that I was wearing a little boys' pajama shirt with monsters printed on it. Reading shitty poetry at a sparsely attended open mic, in college.

Today

Today my son learned how to paddle in the water, how to brush Daddy's hair, how to kiss his books goodnight, and a hundred other things I didn't even register.



Today I learned that Guy Pearce is Australian.

Thirty

Good afternoon. I am now thirty and am available for conversations about the following:

• electric vehicles
• station wagons
• electric station wagons
• 401k match
• Taylor Swift as a brand
• baby gear
• the tiny house movement
• OMG, remember Trapper Keepers?
• Benghazi, I guess
• my skin care regimen
• who makes the best iced coffee
• Did you know John Cameron Mitchell was the voice of the Dunkaroos kangaroo?
• parental leave policies around the globe
• the Coca-Cola Freestyle machine and why doesn't it include a cream soda option?
• any episode of Friends
• sleep training
• have we created a monster in Mark Wahlberg?
• the future of podcasting
• Twitter as a valuable market research tool
• The Americans, Wednesdays on FX!
• horchata

Quick Poll

I found some mold on our bread. 
Should I toss the whole loaf, toss the slices with visible mold, or tear off the moldy bits and eat?


My husband always tosses the whole loaf because he says if you can see the mold, then there's much more that you can't see -- and science/the Internet seems to support him on that. 
But: 

1. It's all the bread we have 
2. It's organic/was pricey 
3. It's just a little bit of white mold -- almost didn't notice it at all
4. I wouldn't be giving any to my child
5. I'm not allergic to mold
6. I would totally just cut it off if it was a block of cheese
7. DH is famously paranoid about food
8. I had a club sandwich at a restaurant one time, and halfway through the club sandwich, I realized that the bread was moldy. I didn't finish it, but I still remember it as the best club sandwich I've ever had. And then the manager gave me two free meals for my trouble
9. I need Nutella toast right now
10. I may have already eaten it as Nutella toast