If I Only Had a Brain

It makes me more than a little sad to turn the calendar to September. I did it today, but I didn't like it.

Despite memories that include the bicentennial and disco, my face still occasionally breaks out with a typically teenage monster zit, a reality I accept and no longer question. Or bemoan.

The perfect lifetime reading list alternates fiction and non-fiction and always allows for short stories when more immediate gratification is needed.

Most nights, I get 8 1/2 to 9 hours of sleep, a fact for which I make no apologies.

Acacia is as constant as the northern star and I have yet to be disappointed with a meal there, including tonight's of ceviche and avocado followed by steamed pork belly buns. My friend's pork shank looked like a Fred Flintstone snack, meaty and enormous.

I don't hear my name said to me by anyone as often as I'd like.

That moment when the lights go down, just before the band I want to see comes onstage, gives me the same thrill now that it did when I was 16.

My whole life might have been different person had I not been born with an outgoing personality, dimples and good legs. Fact.

Two things make me feel like anything is possible: the colors and light of late afternoon at the beach on a sunny summer day and the smell of lilacs in spring.

A friend tells me at dinner tonight, "I wish I'd figured out who I was and what I wanted sooner than I did." She muses about when it was that she got "old" and wonders how she'd not realized.

Are we supposed to? Discuss.