1. Instead of peanut butter on one, jelly on one rule, I was taught to put peanut butter on both slices of bread and jelly on just one…by my mother, who detests peanut butter.
  2. I didn’t know Renée Zellweger wasn’t British until I was 15-ish and saw her on Jay Leno with an American accent, talking about Thanksgiving with her family. My mind was blown. I’d seen Bridget Jones Diary at 12 and never knew better.
  3. I really liked adult-rated stuff when I was too young for it, but more of the Bridget Jones Diary/Sex and the City/American Pie style. It gave me false pretenses about your romantic 20-somethings and I also took myself way too seriously as a pre-teen/teen. 
  4. I don’t live close enough to a recycle center — that and I’m really lazy — so I keep glass bottles. It’s not wasteful, but I mean I’m not really reusing/recycling either. I don’t know how to feel about it.
  5. If you know her you may not guess this, but my mother journaled everything and wanted to pursue photography. I get all my right-brained loves from her. I would say she also gave me my sap, but my parents are both criers. I bet in their 20s they probably had long, serious conversations and cried together a lot. Walking cliches. I guess that was technically two things… 
  6. I also look just like my mother, in a black-and-white photo, when you have no pretense that I have my father’s red hair. 
  7. I can pinpoint the person’s face who made me first consider broadcasting at 12 but she doesn’t know I exist. My last week in my hometown — for a broadcasting internship — she came in a coffee shop I was in, but I didn’t say anything. When I make stories for NPR news, I’ll be sure to tell her.
  8. I listened to a lot of Credence in high school and my high school government teacher told us The Vietnam War worried him that he’d have to quit college. When I asked, he had no recollection of any law that let you bow out of Nam’ if you went to college. I never fact-checked him because I was taught not to question teachers.
  9.  Up until my uncle moved back to my hometown, I had a secret-family-emergency plan that if something awful ever happened to one of my parents, I’d quit school and move home to work for the family business (real estate appraisal). If I felt I had to, I still would.