some confessions:

1.  when i’m home alone, i generally keep the television on to keep me from getting lonely.  most of the time i don’t even watch it; it’s just there, in the other room, blaring the least offensive thing i can find on at any given time.  sometimes, as the hour changes, the least offensive thing becomes the most offensive, but often i’m too lazy to get up and change the channel.  if i’m reading a book, the television is off.  i leave it on, though, for magazines.

2.  my kitchen is mostly infested with miniature bugs.  for months now i’ve been waging war, trying to stave them off, but it’s not really working.  they might be here to stay.

3.  the shower is not very clean.

4.  my refrigerator at any given time contains almost nothing except water, coke, and condiments.  the pantry has rice, spaghetti, cornstarch, and tea.  i don’t eat very well.  today, for example, i’ve had a bowl of spaghetti-os and a slice of pie.

5.  i used to be deathly afraid of thunderstorms.  every night during the summer i would scrunch down in my bed and hope that there wouldn’t be a storm.  when there was one, i would watch for lightning to illuminate the walls of my bedroom, then duck under the covers to wait for the thunder.  one one-thousand.  two one-thousand.  the summer of my fourth-grade year, there were a lot of thunderstorms.  for each one i sat on the couch in the living room and watched astros games with my dad, trying really hard to ignore the fact that lightning was for sure going to strike the big tree in the backyard and send it crashing in through the living-room windows, setting our house on fire and killing us all.  all those nights blend into one in my memory: the television green with grass, the voices of the announcers and crowd drowning out the rumblings, the crack of the bat making me forget the lightning.

i hate baseball.

6.  in junior high, who’s the boss was my favorite show.  if you tell anyone, i’ll kill you.

7.  in traffic, in class, in front of the computer, in front of the television, while waiting in line, when out at bars with friends, i pick my cuticles until they bleed.

8.  i cry a lot.

9.  whatever it is, i probably don’t think you understand.

10.  i sleep alone most nights, and when i turn off the bedside lamp, i don’t open my eyes again until morning.  i do this so i don’t have to see that it’s dark.  i am a little afraid of the dark.  well, not of the dark itself, but of what it could be hiding, usually scary people or fear or whatever it is that would fit in the shadows cast by the orange light in the alley.

if you tell anyone, i’ll kill you.