Whatever personal or financial struggles you managed to put to bed along with your brain scant hours before will return for a full accounting if you awaken in what I call the “robscurity.” You might even pick up a few new neural hitchhikers; for me, death is an unwelcome frequent-flier.

If Julia Child and other cooking-show hosts from my childhood taught viewers specific recipes and kitchen practices, these newer shows exist chiefly as wish fulfillment.

It’s hard to tell people “I’m unemployed right now” and feel like an adult, because we identify ourselves and each other so closely with what we do to earn money. Almost nobody answers this question with “you know, I’m a Trekkie, but when the new movies are coming out, I like Star Wars, too” or “a knitter, as long as the JoAnn’s here doesn’t close down, knock on wood.”

Some people judiciously call my habits “frugal.” People who know me have called me “cheap” or “tight” or, sometimes - rather cruelly, I might add - “Ann.”

None of us start life on our terms; some random sperm decides your biological gender, someone gives birth to you, people name you, raise you with a certain set of values, and relate you to a bunch of people who might just as likely be Nazis as decent folk. It’s a long number of years before you figure out what you like about all this, and what things you’d just as soon throw off a cliff.

"We've got to talk," Neenah told Ulea when he finally vacuumed into existence one week later in the alley with the discarded muffler. She was sitting on an upended barrel she'd found there, armed with her umbrella and a small piece of paper that anyone passing might have mistaken for simply floating around on an air current.

"Learned a lesson, did you?" he wanted to know.

“Don’t assume; it makes an ass out of you and me.” Mom drew this out for me on an actual piece of paper by putting slashes between the letters: ASS / U / ME. I recall being notably impressed, as at age 13 I was still young enough to think this was Mom’s own wordplay instead of a thing parents had been telling their kids for approximately 9,000 years.

I remember the name of the boy who decided his penis was so wonderful that it had to be shown off without solicitation, just as I remember where it happened and the rough timeline, though there are many smaller details I don’t remember. It’s the same way I remember a lot of things that boys and men have done to or called me that somehow involved sex or appearance, that I don’t remember on a daily basis, but these memories do sleep in the back of my mind and they’re not embellished or fabricated.

It used to be if you wanted to argue the merits of Kirk vs. Picard, you kept that to a convention or during a Star Trek viewing in the sanctuary of your own home. Now if you overhear four people arguing about who has better fighting form - Iron-Man or Captain America - well, it might just be lunchtime at the round table in your small-town diner.

Two people outside on the sidewalk were calmly discussing whether something was an earthquake, and suddenly I was upright on the sofa. Nothing was moving from where I sat, but I heard whispering in the next room. As I stood up, the room swayed a little, like it was gently shifting across metal rollers.

People were walking everywhere. Sidewalks were crowded, outdoor escalators and stairwells were packed. The island is only about the size of Chicago proper, but while the Windy City housed about 2 million people, nearly 7 million were crammed into Hong Kong. Hong Kong's 400 square miles are only a hundredth of the size of Tennessee, with nearly twice the number of people as that state. To put it in even more perspective, it's not many fewer than the population of New York City.

Jack and Benny – yes, old-timers, it sounds humorous from this age, too – met us in the terminal, urging us to put aside our luggage for a few moments and crowd together for what proved to the first in a month-long series of group photos. I tried to relax as I stood in front of the flashes popping, but my eyes kept glancing to my four bags. They were all I possessed in this land far from home, and like a mother watching her small children, I was going to make damn sure they didn't walk off with someone else in this voluminous building.

"What I like to do, to amuse myself at the beginning of a long flight like this," she begins, "is as the passengers are coming aboard, I look for the man who appeals to me the most. When I find him, I memorize where he's sitting. I figure if the plane starts to go down, I can grab him and head upstairs with a bottle of wine from Business Class."

Somewhere in 1996-97, if you believe in such things, there were three litters of kittens waiting to be born at different times, and one from each waiting somewhere in the ether of pre-existence to wind up at his eventual home on terra firma. To speculate that these three charmers would have known each other in that form, even if you believe in such things, is probably a stretch. But hey, if you’re going to believe in such things, why not also accept that these three feline souls were gathered in the same part of Wherever?

Don’t be mistaken – it’s not that I consider human beings a superior animal. We’re not the apex of global evolutionary achievement, at least not in the sense that the world revolves around us. The planet is mostly at our disposal because of opposable thumbs and over-large brains equipped to imagine bigger and more than we can ever reasonably use, but we simply ride on the surface of Earth like everything else. And if we screw up that surface and air, it’ll simply kill us and hardly do anything to a 4.5-billion-year-old piece of astronomical rock. I do, however, have valid opinions on things that fly and sting, and those opinions are that they hurt like hell.