THE LITTLE THINGS: Knocked Up (Judd Apatow, 2007)

I just thought it was funny to think about Getty Images having stock footage of egg cells dividing. This leads to so many questions...

Whose - or what's - egg was it? Did that zygote grow up to be something that got a chance for its own egg cells to divide? Who filmed this? Who would agree to let this be filmed? How did Getty Images go about acquiring this footage? What would be written on the invoice? How much did Judd pay to use this footage? Yeah, uh, answered that question myself and it's around, let's say, $2,800. You decide whether it was worth it for any of the parties involved. (Hint: it was for Getty Images.) Please shut up, brain.

Dear Creepy Middle-to-Old-Aged Man Who Lives in the Apartment Next Door to Me,

I know the mailboxes for our complex are on the wall right outside of my window. I know this because I sometimes like to check my mail, too! Then I take it inside of my apartment and read it.

I also know that you're old, and you need your rest, and that it must be hard for you to deal with the physical pain of moving from place-to-place (goddman joints! tell me about it!). Thus, I'm sure that the lawn chair that for some reason is sitting between my front door and our mailboxes must seem pretty appealing.

But seriously, the front door to your apartment is, like, five feet away. And I didn't buy that chair or put it there, but I'm pretty sure the patch of grass it's on is technically part of my rental agreement. And I might want to go outside and do something on that patch of grass, or perhaps something inside my apartment that makes some noise, but my window's open and you're sitting right next to it sorting through your junk mail! Seriously -- five fucking feet! Please, just hobble that marathon distance for me. Then you can lie down and have a nap.


Sincerely,

Erin

IT MUST HAVE HAPPENED: the Weeds writers' room, post season three

Note: this can only possibly be funny if you watch Weeds. Also, y'know: spoilerzzzz!


"Okay guys, so... last season we kind of killed off all of Nancy's competition, and then burned down Agrestic. Any ideas?"
"Well..."
"Uh..."
"Let's have Doug get his dick slammed in a drawer!"
"Yeah!"
"Yeah! ...That is funny, right?"
"Of course it is! It's his dick!"
"I dunno, guys."
"What's there not to get?"
"I just don't know how that kind of joke would slip into the cadence of the show. It's not a racist comment thinly veiled behind the fact that an ignorant character is saying it, and it's not Nancy having sex. I just can't imagine what kind of scene that would fit in."
"Well... remember in season one when Lupita makes that coffee table joke?"
"...Yeah."
"Well..."
"...Symbolism?"
"Bingo!"
"We've also definitely got to get Nancy being raped by a Mexican drug lord in there."
"Oh, for sure."
"I'm just glad that we were able to write out those black people. That dialogue was such a fucking chore. I got so tired of watching The Wire for research."
"Mexican's so much easier because we can just subtitle some Spanish shit and hope the grammatical inconsistencies come off as intentional."
"¡Sí,es muy bien!"
"The rape, though, guys? I love it, but it still seems a little bit extreme, even for the Showtime -- I mean, we're not HBO -- we love the sex, but we gotta have that consent! So let's have her get pregnant and move in with Mexy and have them suddenly 'be in love.' That ought to cover any viewer outrage."
"But we've still definitely got to have that rape."
"Oh, of course."
"And Shane should probably jerk off to naked pictures of Nancy he keeps in a..."
"...SAMMY DAVIS JR. BIOGRAPHY!"
"Yes!"
"And Silas should fuck a young mom who owns a..."
"...Yoga studio?"
"Well, they are liberal whites, but I dunno..."
"...Surf shop?"
"It is California, but..."
"Cheese store?"
"Boo-ya!"
"Perfect!"
"Mmmm, I could go for some Wensleydale right now."
"It's really not fair that Silas should be the only son having sex. I mean, what, Shane is like, twelve, thirteen by now?"
"How can we top the Chinese massage parlor handjob, though?"
"Dude, that was awesome."
"Writer high five!"
"Uh, guys, three words: gothic three-way."
"Yeah, baby!"
"We still got it!"
"Can we have someone shoot a bird somewhere?"
"Hell yes we can!"
"Good. I fucking hate birds."
"What about Dean?
"Didn't he move to Detroit or something?"
"Ah, semantics."
"Guys, guys: blackface."
"...A necessity in any comedy-drama."
"Let's also for sure throw Quinn in there somewhere."
"Who's Quinn?"
"And Celia should probably develop Downs Syndrome or a drug addiction or go to jail or get kidnapped or start selling cosmetics or something. Y'know, something for her to do since everyone hates her and it kind of makes no sense for her to be with them since they all kind of treat her like shit and she probably got some insurance money from the Agrestic fire and could have moved to Cabo or something by now."
"...Spin-off?"
"Celia? She's the dyke, right?"
"No, that's her daughter... but we could make her a dyke."
"Guys! You know what we really need?"
"What?"
"Alannis Morissette."
"Fuck yes."
"I don't know if she can play Mexican, so..."
"Bank teller?"
"High school English teacher?"
"Abortionist?"
"I can taste the Emmys!"
"We should throw Andy in there somewhere, too. For comedy or whatever."
"Let's have him get some money by fucking some lady who makes him pretend he's his dead brother and then buy a bunch of useless shit and gain a lot of weight and grow a unibomber beard."
"It's like you read my mind."
"I dunno, I love it, but the beard? Andy's no murderer."
"Oh, that's Shane, obviously."
"Obviously."
"We should have him kill some more animals first, though, so that people will remember that cougar thing we did."
"I fucking hate cougars."
"When he does kill, would he still be prosecuted, being a minor and all?"
"Shit, someone check Wikipedia."
"Well, does he commit the murder in California, or in Mexico? I feel like if it's in Mexico, we can get away with a lot more blood. Maybe some peeling off of skin. Those kinds of scenes."
"Will there have to be more speaking in Spanish? I'm really tired of using Google Translate."
"Can we get an intern to do that?"
"Fuck it, let's just move them to Seattle."

Adventureland

I love movies like Adventureland. Movies like Breaking Away and Spanking the Monkey and The Last Picture Show. Coming-of-age movies. How could you not love coming-of-age movies? We're all coming of age. We all love movies. Fucking perfect formula right there.


I love the boys these coming-of-age movies are always about.

Not-a-boy-not-yet-a-man. Man-boys. With their smiles and their noses and their button-up shirts that they wear when they're trying to look nice.


But these movies, these coming-of-age movies make me sad because I know those boys like that, those boys that I like, that make me nice-way-squirm when they talk about their degrees in Comparative Literature and Renaissance Studies, about the novels they want to write and read, when they babble about video games and comic books and lofty hopes and dreams -- yeah, those boys would never fall for a girl like me.

If these kinds of movies showcase anything, it's the kind of girl that boys like that want and expect they'll never get.

But they get them.

Eventually.

Always.

Because those girls that they like, with their surprisingly good tastes in music, their surprisingly good senses of humor, their surprisingly deep thoughts under those shockingly beautiful physiques -- yeah, those girls realize how nice and cute and perfect those boys were all along. Those girls realize what girls like me have known from frame one, and that's all it takes. For them.

Acknowledgment.

And I wonder where I could ever fit into a story like this. Where a person like me could fit into Adventureland, a person who doesn't look like Kristen Stewart but would have Martin Starr over Ryan Reynolds any any any day of the week.

And it just doesn't and wouldn't work.

And it makes me sad, it makes me very sad, but I'm not, and I never will be a part of that sort of equation.

Probably because I'd be at home the whole time watching my surprisingly excellent collection of DVDs.

wanting

This is a thing I found that I wrote on 2 September, 2007. That was almost three years ago. What have I even done since then?


I want to take the train cross-country with my grandpa and soak up all his stories so that someone will be there to tell them again when he dies.

I want to go to Seattle where it really doesn't rain that much or that hard and take so many pictures like if I'd never been there before. I want to go up in a tall building and take pictures of the spaceneedle and go up in the spaceneedle and take pictures of tall buildings and then piece them together and make a whole new skyline that no one would dare to recognize.

I want to go to France and pretend I'm pretending to be American and chain-smoke cigarettes.

I want to go to England and smile and have tea and crumpets.

I want to go someplace I've never been before, seeing as I've never really been anywhere.

I want to go to Ann Arbor, Michigan because it seems like a pretty nice place but no one ever really acts like they want to be there.

fictional characters from teevee shows that I basically am:

1. Lindsay Weir from Freaks and Geeks^'
2. Liz Lemon from 30 Rock*^
3. Larry David from Curb Your Enthusiasm*
4. Daria Morgendorffer from Daria*^
5. April Ludgate from Parks and Recreation^
6. Mel from The Flight of the Conchords^
7. Abed Nadir from Community
8. Brendon Small from Home Movies
9. Malcolm Wilkerson from Malcolm in the Middle
10. George-Michael Bluth from Arrested Development*
11. Daisy Steiner from Spaced
12. Velma Dace Dinkley from Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!*^'

*has glasses
^brown-haired lady
'portrayed by Linda Cardellini in live-action form


I don't have any pictures from the Daria year.

1. I've tried to debate it ever since I realized how irritating she is, but I was friends with mathletes in high school before deciding I was "too cool" (sorry guys) for them and started hanging with an "alternative" crowd (if watching Jag är nyfiken - gul counts as "alternative"). I also wore an army jacket. But come on, am I really that much of a buzzkill?

2.Being Liz Lemon is more like a goal than a reality. But I do eat an awful lot of cheese. And wear man-clothes. Half-way there!

3.This is what I would be like if I had already gotten past that whole "money making" stage. Meaning, the scant social skills I currently have would completely disintegrate. Sounds like a plan, Janet.

4.Daria is a little cooler than I will ever be (I totally could never rock the Doc Martens the way she does),but we both do have kind of monotone voices in that deep-for-a-woman-range, and we are both almost exclusively sarcastic to the point that genuine social exchanges become infeasible. Also the fact I used to watch Daria in elementary school must count for something.

5. People I don't even know very well tell me that I remind them of "that girl from that Office spin-off." April has inspired me to pursue a career in stand-up comedy… someday.

6. I am so sorry, Ethan Fogus.

7. Oh god, I know who Abed is based on (though sadly not personally). The curious incident of the girl with the undiagnosed case of butt-patties, indeed. I also watch way too much television.

8. I kind of wish I had been more Brendon-like when I was in fourth grade. There is proof of story-, newspaper-, and play-writing, but movie-making was not until two years down the line. And I really hope I'm not that bossy.

9. I never watched the last few seasons, but please tell me that Malclom does not drop out of school on account of how his genius allows for him to write such witty, insightful blogs and spend so many hours doing things others would perceive as too sedentary and lethargic, but that this keen intelligence ultimately distracts him from his homework. Or earning a diploma.

10. I'm really kind of grateful that I do not have an oppositely-gendered cousin in the same age range. There are possibilities in that field that do not need to be examined.

11. Those scenes where she was trying to concentrate on writing... who needs essays... I should really watch Spaced again.

12. People compare me to Velma when they are done with being creative. Sure, I say, "Where are my glasses?" a lot more than the average person. But that's just because you guys keep hiding them!

A Short One-Act Play Concerning a Dream That I Had Last Night

For my theater class, we had to write a "play" of a dream that we had that week. So I did that.


ACT I
Scene 1
(LIGHTS UP. A bedroom. ROSE, early 20s, sits on a bed. She leans over a wire hamster cage sitting beside her. The hamster jumps on a large, green seed to one side of the cage. ERIN, Rose's younger sister, sits on the bed, watching the rodent.)

ERIN: Y'know, I have a wheel from before… like, a small one. Like, for small hamsters... You could have it.

(Rose gives Erin a nasty look. Erin pulls a hamster wheel out from under the bed. It is rusty, encrusted with dirt and old woodchip shavings. Rose just stares at Erin. LIGHTS DOWN.)

Dear Iowa,

Why are you so cold?


Love,

Erin


P.S. Do you know where a person could find some good winter boots?

oh, the places we'll go

For my screenwriting class/workshop, we had an assignment for which we had to describe -- in maybe more concise prose than I ended up doing -- this room on the first floor of the building where the class is held. So I did that.



The room faces its exit. It hums with the sound of the unseen soda machines next door, with the voices from the bank of nine televisions that nobody's really watching.

The room faces outward, like a non-room, like a non-place, like transience.

The bank of televisions, near the exit, near the clean, pristine recycling bins, near the unseen soda machines next door, broadcasts politics, the news, and commercial breaks. It broadcasts big, scary things. Things disconnected from the people in this room, sitting on the couches or at the tables facing the televisions discussing these things that they aren't really watching, anyway. The bank of televisions televises things upon which the people in this room can't really have an impact. Things outside of this place.

The bank of televisions says: Let me see if I can tell you something about osteoporosis you don't already know.

The people in this clean, pristine, ephemeral sort of place sit on synthetic furniture with spindly legs. Everything is on wheels. Nothing is stationary. This whole room could easily, effortlessly, no big deal just wheel out of the exit that it faces, but no one in it would bother. That's not what they're there for.

The television says: You could be wealthy, wealthy! It only takes a split second!

The people, seated with a certain uncomfortableness on these smooth, sculpted, plastic surfaces, do not wheel the furniture, or watch the televisions, or listen to the hum of the unseen soda machines next door. The people, they read or eat or go on their computers. And they carry out these actions like they have somewhere else to go. This is not a permanent place. People do not take off their shoes here.

Angled, modern windows sneak up corners and walls of this fleeting, transitory room, to a skylight, not hidden but unseen nonetheless by the people below. Balconies peak into this place, from each floor above, but no one is in them. No one looks at this room whether in or outside it. One head can be seen in an office window on a floor above, but it does not turn. It just rests on its neck, unmoving, a potted plant beside it; a coat hanging off the edge of a cubicle.

The television says: It slides, it toasts, it sees, it calls—it's perfect for you and you!

This room -- this is a place for passing through. This is a place on the way to other places. People walk by its doors and windows, but no one stops to gaze in or out. No one leans over its balconies. No one converses, or relaxes, or has a laugh. People cough quietly and then neatly, systematically pack up their things when they are ready to leave.

I only feel inspired to blog when I read other people's blogs, and only then because I feel guilty because I probably have more time and are doing less creative things than those incredibly prolific people, and I can't even set aside a few minutes a day to type up some paragraphs that nobody's going to ever read anyway.

Here is a short film that I wrote/co-directed as a senior in high school:



I thought it was really bad at the time, but now I'm not so sure. Now I just want to get out there and shoot every little tiny script that I write, because it's better to have shot something not-very-good than to... not have, and spent your time reading about what much more motivated people have done.

I wonder if I could take out student loans to buy a camera...

in the morning, in the bathroom, you will find me "Tao Lin" off

I don't like going to American Apparel. It makes me feel poor and un-"trendy." Their mannequins fill the glass window-displays next to the bus stop across the street from the used bookstore that has the cats in it and instead of doing the whole awkwardly-shuffle-wait-and-feign-checking-my-cellphone-and-pretend-to-read-my-book sometimes I'll (regretfully) go inside until the metro comes. This is always a mistake. There is so much spandex and neon, and they always put the nicest stuff upstairs so you have to stay longer; have to make the trek up there and in an unhurried-enough, time-consuming way so as to look "casual." There'll always be, like, one shirt I'm interested in, but it's always $40 or more. I'm not a "career-woman;" I don't have that big of (or rather: any) disposable income and so I'll say, "Fuck this shit, Goodwill works for me," and go back outside and resume not-making-eye-contact.

But I can see why Tao Lin would title a book Shoplifting from American Apparel. I can see why a person would do that. If I had the skills, I'd do it. Clearly I don't because I am constantly running out of money from not having it in the first place and from spending all that I do have on goods that could otherwise be stolen. Obviously, I am not a master in the art of petty theft because I am writing this instead of going to the nearest Barnes & Noble and slipping Tao Lin's novella into the secret-inside-pocket of my "dad jacket" that makes me kind of look like Daria. I regret having started-to-read Les Misérables at so young an age, as I fear it has instilled in me a great terror of getting caught wrong-doing by the authorities, and this makes the ability to truly shoplift a personal impossibility.

One time while at Barnes & Noble I wanted to buy Miranda July's No One Belongs Here More Than You. I asked the info-desk man about it because none were on the shelf. He looked it up on his computer-monitor from the early-aughts and said that there were some in stock and led me back to where I had just come from. But I know my alphabet, and I know my way around a bookshelf, and even when this khaki-slack-donning man knelt down and scanned spine-to-spine, there were still no copies physically there. Apparently, going by what the man told me, a lot of Miranda July books went missing this way. I wonder about that sometimes, about what kind of "status" goes with being an author hip to the type of demographic that wants to read your work but doesn't want to pay for it; whether those "sales" still make the publisher money; whether this practice discourages book stores from carrying the kinds of books that I like to read.

I like Tao Lin a lot, though, so I pay for his books. But I still buy them used from amazon because I am cheap.

ghosts

There are probably ghosts at my university. I don't believe in ghosts, per se, but the evidence stacks too highly in their ethereal favor for me not to at least make a note about it.

For one thing, Patrick Swayze dies of pancreatic cancer and then the same week Shwayze comes to Iowa City. Coincidence? Yeah, coincidence like "accidentally" renting both Ghost and Dirty Dancing on the same night.

There's also the fact that there's a bookstore called "The Haunted Bookstore" in Iowa City. In that phantom-friendly establishment, there's a desk with a drawer labeled "for ghost use only." There's also a piano. I played part of "Downtown" by Petula Clark on that piano. In one of my classes today, the professor played a clip from 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould that had the song "Downtown" in it. I told the guy I was sitting next to about how I can play "Downtown" on the piano. That guy interviewed Shwayze when they visited. I shit you not.

I can see what you're trying to pull, Universe, and I don't like it one bit.

But this shit gets realer. It gets eerie. It gets creepy as fuck.

Late at night, like when it starts approaching three, four in the morning, we've been hearing sounds. People running. They don't talk; they don't speak; they don't make a noise but that of feet connecting with floorboards. They just run. I thought I was imaging this. I thought I was probably making it up. I thought I was delusional but then my roommate asked me, nonchalantly, when we were both quietly hunched over computers at our respective desks in the study area:

"You know those people at night?" she asked.

"What?" I responded, taking off my headphones.

"Those people... what do you think they're running from?"

That was the first and only time my roommate has come close to truly astounding me. Ghosts can do that to a relationship.

an explanation

I had to do this thing for a class, where I wrote about whether I was a "reader" or a "writer." Apparently, no one else in the class has an intense, Theo Huxtable-comparable learning disability, and thus wrote a paragraph instead of, like me, a, well, essay.

But after writing the "discussion response," I decided, you know, if I want to write more often, then I just should. So I started this blog. And I've started trying to write more instead of just writing ideas for things that I should write. Who cares if it they turn out to be shit? If they're shit just don't post them on the internet.

(Also, I really need to stop listening to Queen, Supertramp, and Steely Dan, cos they are definitely not bands that inspire poetic thoughts.)



I tend to delude myself into allowing the word "writer" to define me. I used to be content, when at the doctor's and they'd have you fill out a little questionnaire during a check-up, and they had a little friendly section at the end for "hobbies," with just putting "reading." I was quite the voracious reader. I read all sorts of books, some of which were much too easy for me, and many of which were too impossibly adult. I would read in restaurants, and at the dinner table, and next to blaring stereos at loud barbeque parties, and late late at night, under the covers with "Mr. Lightman," so as not to wake my sister in the bunk below. I always thought my mother was a little embarrassed of this, of the lack of variation in my "hobby" response, as though, even being a fellow reader herself, she yearned for me to be a child who also did soccer or ballet or taekwondo or something else widely regarded as active.

Then in sixth grade I stopped playing with Playmobil and started writing short narrative fiction, and I became a "writer." Even though a passion for movies, and a tumultuous love affair with television, began two years later, it became very easy to classify myself as a "writer." It has this certain mystique. When you say you write people get this mental image of someone brooding and angsty, with a typewriter and a coffee cup (or at least I get a mental image of them imagining this). I can't say I particularly mind that stereotype all that much, though it does seem to often confuse acquaintances into believing I'm a composer of poetry, which I'm not (I'm more the "glaringly autobiographical" short stories/screenplays kind of writer). Calling yourself a "reader" — saying, "oh, I like reading" — has that connotation of a person who has no one to sit next to in the dining hall and so pulls out their companion-replacing, always-friendly novel. Which can make for a nice time, but still has that feeling of loneliness to it.

(Right now, I have checked out from the library, four nonfiction books about smelling, three biographical accounts of J.D. Salinger, and one CD/book set and one dictionary concerning the Swedish language that I really really would like to, but will in all probability never end up using before the due-date is up.

I don't "mostly read nonfiction" or anything, though. It would be more accurate to say I mostly don't read nonfiction. I mostly read fairly-popular, pretty well-acclaimed modern fiction works that somehow, though, the people at my job at a movie theater have never heard of, and never really like when I lend to them. Lately, though, I've been branching out with some literary graphic novels and absurdist plays. But that's hardly straying from home. The same directors direct and the same actors act in the cinematic adaptations of all of these print forms. It's still pretty safe territory for me. It's not like me reading poetry — I have very certain, very few moods in which I can truly appreciate poetry. I have to somehow (impossibly) rid myself of all my alternative-comedy pretentions while adopting some degree of Beatnik, snapping-instead-of-clapping snobbery. This is hard for me to do. Though admittedly, I do own more than one beret, and I have dressed up as "Judy Funny" for Halloween. Yet when reading nonfiction, I become almost surprised with the mood it puts me in, with the degree to which I realize I am a knowledge-hungry person, seeking not just acceptance into the land of the "informed," but just pure information itself. I get excited, by the facts I encounter. Nonfiction-excitement is very unlike its fiction counterpart, during which just the order of words can make me giggle to myself in this weird, almost surreal sort of happiness that causes all others in my near vicinity to shoot disapproving glares.)

Writing, though, it's so different from reading. Writing is such a self-obsessed yet self-loathing, incredibly arduous yet enjoyable task—this transcribing and then editing and re-editing what started as just a nothing sort of sentence, a nothing sort of idea you just thought of. Reading, though — you're presented with this giant something, and you sift through, trying to get the general gist, while at the same time scoping out those tiny little bits of nothing that you have to pause after, to give yourself a moment to absorb the fact that someone wrote that something; to give you a moment to smile softy to yourself. Reading is what makes writers feel guilty enough to write something themselves.

But just saying I'm a "writer," well... it's kind of a lie. It's kind of a fantasy. I'm more the kind of person who thinks about writing all the time, but really only does it sporadically, in little bursts of scribbles, always at the least opportune of times. I'm more the kind of person who has a file box full of terrible first drafts and illegibly scrawled ideas—nothing finished, nothing authored. I'm the kind of person who reads the blogs of people who actually get around to writing things, and thinks, reading those entries, "Wow, that is exactly how I think. That is exactly how I feel." I'm the sort of person who quietly falls in love with the people who take the time to write down the feelings and thoughts I never bother to transcribe. I'm a person who thinks, frequently enough for it in a way to have become a habit, about making my own blog, for others to read, and relate to, and quietly fall in love with the girl with glasses and soft, introspective demeanor who wrote it.

So I guess more so than a reader or a writer I'm a dreamer. I'm a hoper unfortunately holed up in the same mind as a pessimist and an extremely vast amount of logic. I think about things in terms of their statistical probability of happening, and that's kind of a bad environment for a writer to live in. I can't grapple with fantasy. I wish I could be much more writerly than I really am, but I'm stuck with being a reader, a reader who genuinely loves the kind of stuff she likes to read.


P.S. I totally finally figured out how to turn off "smart quotes" in Microsoft Word while posting that. And did anyone catch the oh-so-subtle Supertramp allusion? Anyone?

falling in love

I will probably fall in love with you if you are quiet, and don't say much, and seem to have a thousand thoughts that never make it out of your mouth.

Or if you're loud and make good jokes that make me laugh, even just the inside-kind.

I will probably fall in love with you if you listen to the same incredibly-obscure indie music, or watch the same nobody-rents but terribly-brilliant films, or if you read the same rambling and whiny kind of novels I'm always going on about. I will definitely fall in love with you if you watch the same television shows that I do; if you listen to their commentary tracks; if you fall in love with the same sort of fictional and nonfictional people that I always seem to be falling in love with.

If we've met, and you're a little bit pretentious, and a little bit funny, and a little bit sentimental, then I'm probably in love with you. (If we've never met and you fit those criteria, it is an absolute certainty that I am in love with you.) I will never let on to this love, though. If you ask I will deny it to the end. I will disconcertingly, obnoxiously, rudely list all the other scores of people I am in love with as if to say, Hah! Quite clearly this means I am not in love with you!

Don't listen to me, though. I'm obviously lying. But I'm quite a good liar, so you will probably believe me. You might even feel rather hurt, and embarrassed, looking back on the whole situation in retrospect. But imagine how I feel — I've just openly denied my love! I've just publicly betrayed my heart!

If you act at all interested in me, I'm probably not in love with you. I'm probably a bit frightened of you, honestly. I probably secretly think you're a rapist. I probably have imaged conversations in which I tell one of my myriad soul mates how much you scared me, how much you creeped me out, and they reassure me by doing something that somehow makes me fall even deeper in love with them.

If you have a soft voice, I'm probably in love with you.

If you wear mismatched socks, or have glasses or a beard, or if you sometimes forget to fix your hair before leaving the house, then I'm probably in love with you.

If you play an instrument, or have ever created something beautiful, or adorable, or just incredibly fantastic — if you work at a boring, mundane, everyday job that you absolutely hate — if you have ever wished that you were a different person than the person that you are now — then yes, you guessed it, the statistical odds do predict that it is highly likely that I am in love with you.

If I've made eye contact with you, then I'm probably in love with you.

If I've avoided eye contact with you, then I'm probably in love with you. Or I think you're a rapist.