So lately I've been doing this really embarrassing, Oprah Magazine-y, you-go-girl type of thing. I've been writing love letters to myself. I don't mean that as a metaphor. I don't go out and get a latte, feel guilty, and then say to myself, "You totally deserve this, beautiful," (to the weird looks of other coffee-going customers). I literally and legitimately have been writing long, syrupy, sometimes kind of sexy love letters. Then I put them in envelopes, address them to myself, and put them in the mail with my own address on the envelope and a stamp. Yes, I know how much a stamp costs. And yes, I know that I live close enough to myself that I could easily walk to my house to drop off the letter in person. But there's just something about getting a letter in the mail -- especially an emphatic, doting, periodically salacious one -- that is particularly exciting.

My longest and most genuinely functional-seeming romantic relationship was with a comic book writer I had written a glorified fan letter to. He was much younger than me, so I think he saw my infatuation with him as sort of exotic. I had all these things he didn’t yet have: a job, a cat, groceries from the grocery store that I bought with my own money, shampoo, etc. I had been a shitty girlfriend to enough people to know how to not be one anymore, and I think that was also an attractive quality I possessed. The thing that attracted me to him, of course, was that he was my favorite comic book artist.

I am unfortunately inclined towards the kinds of sayings that are made into magnets. Do I have "Keep Calm and Carry On" coaster? Yes. I hate this about myself, but yes. Do I secretly write down bumper sticker phrases -- like "Life doesn't put things in front of you you are unable to handle," or "In the end we only regret the chances we did not take" -- in a tangerine colored notebook titled "Things To Keep In Mind?" Guilty. If I was at someone's house and noticed they had tons of encouraging quote paraphernalia (especially, but not limited to, encouraging quotes made into vinyl stickers in Papyrus to be stuck on walls), I would dismiss that person entirely and never respond to their text messages. And yet, I am one of them. 

I made an appointment with a therapist. I'm telling you this precisely because I don't want to; because the whole idea completely mortifies me; because writing "I made an appointment with a therapist" reads to me like, "Well, I'm officially a complete failure. Soon I will live in a garbage can." 

I heard on "This American Life" that you're never supposed to talk about your dreams because no one is interested in them. The exception, of course, is when you have a dream about the person you are talking to. We all like to be stars in other peoples' subconsciouses. 

I've been really into watercolors lately. That's significant because if you had asked me when I was thirteen if I would ever be into watercolors, I would look at you like you had just asked me if I believed the Backstreet Boys were ever going to break up. That is to say, I would have thought it was extremely unlikely. 

Last week Eva's cousin T, who was seven months old, died in her sleep. Eva's mom called to let me know, and I could tell she'd been repeating the news a lot. She had the kind of dull thud to her voice that sits just outside of grief -- a sort of fuzzy autopilot that flutters into gear in the wake of necessity. 

Yesterday I got a rare gift. I was in the Lower Garden District (probably the most inconveniently far-away neighborhood from house in New Orleans proper), when my bike got a flat tire.

Lonely Sinornithosaurus Wants To Make You Soar: I'm usually not good at describing myself but here it goes. I'm a big guy; charming; a gentleman; covered in feathers from head to toe. I'm not avian, but I can pass for avian if that's your thing. I'm not too classy (Read: PRETENTIOUS) for a little role-playing! I'd prefer that you were single, a little demure, and also feathered. It's not a deal-breaker if you're not, but I tend to do better with other feathered species. It's not that I'm a bigot or anything, I just find it hard to get excited about girls who don't have feathers. Anyway, if something I wrote here piqued your interest, there's more where that came from! Just make sure that when you reply to this ad you put in the subject line "I'M FEATHERED." That way I'll know you're a real (feathered!) girl who read my ad and not a robot, or SPAM.

• Flappy Noodle: Tap on your device to make the noodle flap. Flap to try to avoid obstacles like "being eaten" or "being eaten by a bird" or "being eaten by a dog." Ultimately, flapping is futile, because you are a noodle. Noodles are powerless to do anything. Gamers have lauded Flappy Noodle as "harder than Flappy Bird." Nietzsche scholars have lauded it as "relevant."

I don't make plans on Thursday nights. My two roommates and I have Family Dinner on Thursdays, and it's sacred. It's the most important plan I keep, and I accept hands-down that the dinner will take the entire night. 

Sometimes I look at substitute teachers and think, "Hey. Most substitute teachers seem pretty sad and fat." Yesterday, while substitute teaching, I realized that there is a reason for that. The reason is that substitute teachers deserve to be sad and fat. What I mean to say is that they've earned it. It's a very depressing, fattening job. I want to buy all the world's substitute teachers vats of ice cream and jars of fudge -- the saddest food combination out there -- just to say, "I get it."

I woke up this morning at 3 a.m. to the kind of rain that begs you to submit to it. It sounded like the sky had found millions of tons of dry rice and was emptying the grains mercilessly onto the sidewalks. 

This Rilke poem, "The Archaic Torso of Apollo," has come up in my life many times. This weekend, it turned up at the wonderful Mel Chin exhibit, which just opened at the New Orleans Museum of Art. Here's the poem.