I’ve almost never fully understood what my currency has been at any point in my life. What a waste my twenties were in this regard and what a crappy thing to have silly things like ideals. I remember giving up an invitation by a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences to attend the Oscars with him because I thought he was a little suspect and aged (I think I’m older now than he was then, by the way) and I didn’t like his hair much, because I was that nit-picky. I also thought that surely if an opportunity to go to the Oscars was being presented to me at 22, I would certainly have others-- I didn’t realize that it was youth and naivety that were my sources of power at the time (I thought it was just my plain ol’ ”badassness”). What giant lady balls I had! I would stomp on kittens to have any number of those lost opportunities now. Yes, I said stomp on KITTENS. Or even BUNNIES, though at this stage of the game I would try and use my feminine wiles to get the dude to cut his hair, which I am quite sure at this point he already has, or at the very least make sure he didn’t take Corey Feldman as his backup date, which he actually did, much to both my disgust and to my delight.

The only time that I can think of in my past when I did know what it was that was my source of advantage was my senior year in college. I was one of the few people (I think there were fifty of us total) that petitioned to live in off-campus housing and had a non Middlebury sponsored residence, which meant I had a nice kitchen and a wood burning stove, which was cozy, if not completely necessary, since this was Vermont and we were all semi-lame pseudo-hippies that smelled good. Anyway, because I wasn’t on the meal plan in the dorm and because there was a food co-op right down the street and because that co-op sold ramen noodles and Annie’s mac and cheese and because I washed down every meal with at least three cans of Milwaukee’s Beast (that’s not a typo), I had acquired quite the culo. My solution? Use whatever means at my disposal to lose the fat ass. And what was at my disposal, you might ask: why, my kitchen and my (sort of) ability to follow directions.