I kept my subscription to Cricket until about the 8th grade (and kept it a secret, as well). In the meantime, I’d found Bop and Teen Beat and TEEN and Young Miss. At about age 11 I started reading Rolling Stone, Interview, Vanity Fair and Vogue.

And then, of course, came Sassy.

Oh Sassy, alternative elixir of the teenage goddess.

[Insert rueful, romantic sigh.]

Sassy changed everything. Absolutely everything. We know this. (And if we don’t, there are blogs and zines and books on the topic.) Sassy was sometimes the only thing in my life that didn’t suck.

Moving on, then. In high school, I had a brief but phenomenal internship at Dirt, the short-lived “Sassy for boys” run by Mark Lewman, Andy Jenkins and Spike Jonze. (Yep, that Spike Jonze.) Me and three cool guys in their 20s, in a high-rise in Los Angeles. I was fantastically awkward, to the point that it freaked me out a little bit when Lew (as Mark is called) offered to take me to lunch. (Hope I managed to hide that.)

The next year, I started producing a hand-lettered (OMG WE DIDN’T HAVE A COMPUTER–but neither did anyone else I knew) zine called Fiend. In college I did a few more issues of Fiend (in Word, no less) and actually did it into my 20s, when I sold it on the shelves at the West Hollywood Borders store. Then I did an online magazine for teenage girls. It was called Lulu, and I modeled it after Sassy, which every sleazy teen magazine in production had been trying desperately to copy for upwards of ten years. It featured a full staff, all of whom worked for free, and produced three great issues and a ton of excellent reader-love emails, which I’ve kept.

That all took place while I was working as the director of editorial at another magazine. It was a parenting magazine for low-literacy, low-income, Spanish-speaking parents, and while I loved serving that segment of the community, the office environment was abysmal. (Upside: because of the never-ending insanity there, I learned more in 3 years than I could have possibly imagined: press checks, design, layout, pagination, ad sales, corporate sponsorships, Spanish-language editing, and how not to treat people.)

When I run into friends I haven’t seen in awhile, they tend to be surprised by whatever I’m up to. And to be honest, when some new development comes along (like the interview I’ve secured for the fall issue of Delish!), I’m often surprised and I wonder at what I’m doing right suddenly. But in reality, I haven’t done anything “suddenly”.  I’ve kind of followed this path my whole life. There’s no real spontaneity. There is a continuum.

What about you? Tell me about you. What path have you been on for longer than you care to remember?

Jacob was no exception. Except that he was; endlessly hip, with a sneer at once lascivious and sweet, he was also slightly younger than the status quo. And she remembered a couple of his songs from her childhood. So when she saw him that night, sitting on a bench in the garden of a mid-level hotel just after a gig, she felt pressed into service somehow. Later she wouldn’t be able to explain the sensation, but just then it was as though everything in her life had led to this moment, and everything in heaven and earth was holding its breath, waiting to see her take the stage and move forward the events that needed to happen. How do you explain something like that, afterward? You can’t.

She approached him as though he’d been expecting her, greeted him as though she knew him. He responded in like.

“Great show tonight,” she said.

“Hey, thanks,” he said, squinting over the pool as he took a drag.

“Mind if I sit? Are you expecting anyone?”

“Just you,” he said. Grinning and blowing cigarette smoke away from her.

Because it felt scripted, she wasn’t nervous. She knew, somewhere, that once she’d gotten up and a few feet away from him she would begin to shake, but for now her overactive nervous system was, effectively, cockblocked.

Chloe crossed her legs and waited. (For what?, she thought.)

“I’m Jacob,” he said, offering his right hand.

“I know.” Half-smile, half-smirk. “I’m Chloe. Pleasure.” They shook.

It was that thing of knowing yet not knowing; of feeling absolutely certain of a thing and yet having absolutely nothing on which to base that certainty. She knew she was meant to be there, with this man in particular, and that was all. She couldn’t have said what he was wearing or really even what he looked like. He was The Target, or The Goal, or The Conveyance. She wasn’t sure which. For all she knew, she might very well be any of those herself. Instead, or simultaneously. And for all the lack of control that it implied, it felt like quite the opposite. She was here on a mission, and she would be the victor.

“So, Chloe,” Jacob said. “What brings you to Carrickton?”

“I spent summers here as a child. Thought I’d do it again this summer, just one last time. My parents wanted me to clear out the house before they sell it, so here I am.”

“Here you are.”

“Mm.”

“Where do you live when you’re not in Carrickton?”

“In the city.”

“Of course. What do you do with yourself there?”

“I do a little bartending, a little photography, a little jewelry design.”

“Multi-talented creature.”

“That’s me. What do you do when you’re not being Jacob Ferro?”

“A little bartending, some photography.”

“No jewelry design?”

“Not lately, no.”

It seemed to Chloe that fragments of the conversation happened at high speed and others so slowly that their words were mottled and warped.

“So, Jacob.”

“So, Chloe.”

“I’m going to go pay someone to pour me a drink. You’re welcome to join me.”

“That sounds great, Chloe. That sounds great. Tell you what, I’ll meet you there in five minutes. I need to pop back into my room for a minute.” Pause. “Unless you want to come with me, then we can walk over there together.”

She smiled. “I’ll meet you there.”

I stare at the harbor, at the lights. Tune out the chatter. Breathe in the night air. Remember other nights like this, in other cities, other countries. Once a year, this look back. Like binoculars. One night, then another, then another, and a gradual pulling back to see all of those nights, to begin to recognize their patterns, and the bigger pattern, the biggest of all.

Like popcorn, the loudest part comes at the end. We say good night and make our way back down to our place, fireworks straggling here and there, as they will for the next couple of hours. For the next couple of days.

It’s a hard thing to look at.

It’s a hard thing to realize (that finality, that clink), the notion that your fate is sealed, more or less. However well-appointed your cage might be, however delightful 99.9% of the time, it is your captor.

It’s about the shrinking of choices. The narrowing, the paring down of your menu.

It’s about never quite feeling that you’ve arrived, and one day realizing that you’ve been departing for ages.

It’s impermanence, and the lack of sweet spot between “One day I will” and “Back then I used to.”

Then again, perhaps it’s simply a wake-up call. An alarm sounding for those who may hear it, to get up and live.

A reminder that our comforts are not the end goal. That there’s always another layer to strip back. Another kindness to be done. Another dragon to be slain.

Get up, it says. Get up and live. Get up.

*No, Mr Morrison, I’m not. But I do work hard.

“Uh…do you remember what else it says? Or how else it goes?”

“It says ‘Shake your leg.’”

“It says ‘Shake your leg’?!” Surely I have no such song.

“Yes!” He is beginning to lose his patience, but bravely hanging onto it. “Those guys sing it. And they go like this.” He makes a face like he’s about to whistle.

But of course.

“Oh! Yes!” So I find it for him, and he plays it three times in a row.

Here are those guys, singing that song. Happy Friday.

I was fourteen. In Mr. Bland’s English class, the assignment was to first create a silhouette of our heads, on posterboard, and then decorate it with images, words, whatever—things that represented who we really were. Naturally, I decided to cut my silhouette out, cover a similar-sized piece of posterboard with white-on-black polka-dotted wrapping paper, and then glue my silhouette down on that. (Needless to add, a couple of Bono’s lyrics also made it onto the collage.) I had no trouble laying down images of my favorite musicians, writers and actors. But at the time, I was a vegetarian, and possibly a member of PETA as well, if memory serves. And I wanted a small image of a cute baby animal to add to the collage. And there was nothing. Nothing at all. I looked everywhere, even decided that if I found an image in one of the multitudes of books in our family library, I would cut it out (absolute sacrilege, nothing less, in our home). But there was nothing. I kept picturing a tiny cutout of a pig or a lamb. Nothing. National Geographic? Nothing.

As I stood facing one of the corners of my room, something in my peripheral vision moved. As I started to turn toward it, time slowed down. I saw that whatever it was, was fluttering slowly down, as though from the ceiling, and it was flat. Like something made out of paper. As it continued to fall, I made out that it was shaped like a cutout of a four-legged animal. I knew, without a doubt, that it was a tiny animal for my collage.

When it finished falling to the floor (it seemed to take ages, but was only a few seconds, I’m sure), I picked it up and turned it over. It was the image of a pig, cut out, in the manner of a paper doll without notches, from a magazine. It looked like it had been cut out much earlier, as there was a bit of wear around the edges. I knew what it was, and I knew what it was for, as easily as I knew my name or my phone number. But how? Why? I looked up to the place it had fallen from, and there was nothing there besides ceiling. I think at one point I even stood on a chair to see whether there were any strange cracks or crevices in the acoustic popcorn up there. Of course, there was nothing.

My collage was complete. And twenty years later, I still wonder.

Next, Havi is really really really speaking to me lately. Like, every new thing she writes feels custom-made with me in mind. Which is so very much like the wrapping-up-in-a-soft-blanket that my brain and its associated parts needs sometimes. Thank you, sweet and wonderful Havi.

Thirdly, there is this song. I got sort of obsessed with it a couple of years ago, and can’t get enough of it, again, lately. Argentine heartthrob Leonardo Favio performs it live in that clip, adorably, along with the girl who adorably responds to his chatter and queries.  It may just be the sweetest, most adorable song ever recorded, and you’ll have to trust me on that, unless you spreckens die Spanish, because it unfortunately doesn’t translate well to English. Le sigh!

(There’s another song on the same album, in which he sings [where "singing" = "shouting in romantic agony"] about wanting to memorize your body with his mouth. I am so serious. And laments the children you’ll never have together, because you can never be his, and will never be his. If you speak any Spanish at all, may I implore you to go listen to this song? But maybe not if you’re feeling the least bit emotional. Unless you’re looking to open the floodgates, as it were. Cause this song will do the trick.)

Moving on, however reluctantly (CUTE ROMANTIC BOY! MUST TEAR SELF AWAY!): this week I’ve had the pleasure of speaking on the phone to two of my Twitter/internet friends, and am looking forward to another two before the week is up. Listen, @soundhunter, Clementina, Sarah and Randi: you make my world a better place.

As do the rest of you people. You, on my Twitter stream, offering to help me with PDFs. You, chatting to me on Facebook and being so kind and patient with me. You, reading this. You’re good people. Don’t let ‘em tell you otherwise.