  Tonight marks my first insomniac post. Consider it an experiment in sleep deprivation... When I was younger, I had a terrible complex about my last name. As it starts with a 'Z' and as a result, I was last for everything. Roll call, student-of-the-week, last kid to present her report on Ladybugs, I was even last in my Royal Academy of Dance exams. So I vowed as a seven-year-old to marry a name whose last name started with a letter in the first half of the alphabet. I was obsessed with this concept. When all my friends were deciding that Jonathan Taylor Thomas was cute, I could not count myself among my love-struck peers.
I really loved my fifth grade teacher. Her name was Mrs. Heidenrich and I was the only kid in the class who liked her. When I whined about having to read a filmsy, 100-page book for our new American Reveloution unit, she let me read a book about Sarah Revere all by myself. When the other kids were discussing the book, it was my job to sit in the back of the classroom and busy myself in analysis of Sarah's life. Stranger still is that I was so pleased with myself that I didn't have to read with the other kids.
Even then, I thought they were destined to become lemmings and hip-hop listeners. In sixth grade I was the MC for our school's annual talent show. My co-host was a boy named Michael, who was the only student in the entire school who was taller than me. We did a very good job, I thought, until I was supposed to laugh really hard at a really bad joke he made (something to do with a piano song title) I happened to be very sick that week, a large cluster of snot was lodged in my throat.
As I faked laughed, I hooked a luggie off the stage. Michael was very nice and pretended nothing happened. No one really seemed to notice but him and the kid who was about to play piano, but it still is burned into my memory as one of the most embarrassing moments of my childhood. When I was nine and at church camp, my swimming buddy tried to do a back drive off the floating dock. She dove underneath the dock and got stuck. Everyone was called out of the water and she eventually came out, very blue but otherwise very fine.
Still, ever since I have nightmares about being stuck under that damn floating dock and not being able to get out. I used to eat dog biscuits with my brother. We used to think if we ate enough we could speak dog-language. One day my mom found us sitting inside our Brittany Spaniel's doghouse snacking on some. She then forbid us to eat them ever again. I became very angry at her, as did my brother. G-dogg said hello to me this morning and tipped his hat like gentlemen used to do in movies like Fred Astere and Humphrey Bogart used to do in old-time movies. I almost curtsied, but didn't have the courage to. It's really hard to let myself like someone like him. Because he is possible, but he is wonderful and mysterious and makes me grin like a seven-year-old. It's dangerous to want him. Affectionately... Anna 
