Baby’s favorite foods:

Twinkies, Coca-Cola, cookies, bread, pizza, chocolate milk, cereal

My parents were the types of people who kept ketchup in the refrigerator. It wasn’t until I was in my 30s that I realized how unusual and unnecessary this habit was. “Has it not occurred to you,” a girlfriend once asked, exasperated, “that ketchup sits out all day long on restaurant tables?”

This had not, in fact, occurred to me. “I guess I just figured that restaurants went through ketchup so fast it didn’t need to be refrigerated,” I half-heartedly defended myself.

Even I didn’t buy my own bullshit.

I am often oblivious to my surroundings. I can become so absorbed in whatever it is I’m doing that I lose all sense of time and space. I can’t keep house plants alive because I eventually stop noticing that they exist. Sooner or later, they fade into the nebulous background of my consciousness and I stop watering them altogether. It took over a year for my snake plant to starve to death and I barely noticed its slow decline.