Chai
I know all this not because he told me, but because I can smell it. It sits on the left-upperhand corner of his desk every day, patiently waiting to be consumed. The scent is that of pumpkin pie, laced with cinnamon and whipped cream. I know it’s chai. It’s a very distinctive scent.

Veracity
“The service,” she repeated slowly. That meant a eulogy. A speech, given by some stranger whose religious occupation bade him do so, full of nice words and half-truths. The preacher didn’t know her father, as they never actually attended church anyway, yet he would tell the world the man’s life story as told to him by others. The Disney version of it, anyway. It could be cleaned and bleached, all the dark blotches removed, then buffed and polished to eliminate irregularities and rough edges. A flawless, shiny, smooth life. An illusion of perfection. A fallacy.

Drama Queen
I should have learned long ago that my plans never go like they’re supposed to. Andrew says I’m too impulsive, and maybe he’s right, but I was just so thirsty. And Ale8s always taste better in a bottle – especially the returnables. So when I saw the machine all lit up outside of the closed-down Chevron downtown, I had to stop. It was one of the old Ale8 machines, the kind with the clear glass door that you open before pulling one of the bottles from the slots. The whole operation took twenty, thirty seconds, tops. I didn’t even bother to take the keys out of the ignition. It’s just that the door-locking habit is so hard to break…

ORIGINAL NON-FICTION

On reading and writing
But good writers aren’t always book authors. I’ve always told people that the lyrics of a song are what draws me in first -- not the melody or the music from the other instruments. Every non-instrumental song has to have someone who penned the lyrics, and so many of these writers are magical to me as well. Hearing a musician belt out words that describe you so well that you could have written them yourself is an often unsettling, but remarkable feeling. Often lyrics are written in fragments, or use improper grammar, or sometimes they appear to not even make sense at first glance, but when you hear them, it’s perfection.

And that's what college is all about
The wind was fierce. That’s another thing I felt I’d been misled about – hurricane-force gales whipping through the campus. Why hadn’t any upperclassmen giving a tour thought to tell us poor undergrads to invest in a full-size golf umbrella that wouldn’t blow inside out every five minutes? Or tell us not to even bother fixing our hair, because it would just look like stale hay by the time we got to class anyway? That’s what real campus life was all about.