You can picture it, I’m sure: It is 2 a.m. My body is a tightly coiled slinky of stresserosity, ready to go springing out of my house, roll down the hill and into Beebe Lake. My hair is a frizzy mess, my eyeballs are bugging out at all sides and I have a Jason Segel-sized bowl of soymilk and entire box of Life cereal (think: Forgetting Sarah Marshall), two cooling cups of coffee, a beer and a pack of cigarettes in front of me. I am a crazed person. I qualify for a straightjacket.

I have a paper due.

I often daydream about beating up my enemies. Usually in these daydreams, I’m wearing an awesome Wonder Woman costume.

I approach said naysayers and say, “Naysayers?”

“Yes, Julie?” Except instead of Julie they use a word that starts with B and ends in -itch.

“Hiyaaaaaaaaa!” (Those are my mad ninja sounds.) “Prepare to get an ass whooping!”

And then I whoop their respective asses.

When I was a freshman, I had a full-fledged mega-crush on IvyGateBlog.com. I thought it — and its editors — were the funniest and hottest shit ever. I’m talking banana phone levels of hilarious. I didn’t even know Chris Beam and Nick Summers (the founders), but I had these sort of creeper-esque fantasies about going to work for them, and becoming BFFs. And then, maybe one day we would all work at Slate together. In fact, the fame-whore in me would get excited whenever one of my articles made it onto Ragtime, even though it was rarely in a positive light.

This past year I picked up a mild smoking habit. I say mild because it’s laughable to call it a habit: I went from being a soap-box anti-smoker, to becoming an occasional social/stress smoker (replete with a really personally embarrassing/toolish situation in which I mooched a cigarette from a friend … and proceeded to smoke it backwards).

In Nepal, though, I starting smoking a couple cigarettes a day. This was not out of some belated rebellion to my cancer doctor parents, or an attempt to look cool (haven’t we already established that I am not, nor will ever be, cool?). This was because cigarettes cost less than a dollar a pop.