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Why E-Readers Are the Devil

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I moved about a mile away on May 31 and am loving the roommate-free life so far. Moving is a huge pain, though, and despite my efforts to get rid of as much as possible prior to moving, I still ended up realizing that I have way too much stuff. I do, thankfully, have more space for it in my new space and I’ll be working again to get rid of more of it, but still.

A lot of the stuff I have, though, is books. Here’s what my bookshelves look like AFTER I got rid of the ones I didn’t want:

As much as a pain it was to move six or seven full boxes of them, though, I’m glad I own all these books. I have no intention of being a person whose bookshelves aren’t full.

And I absolutely have no intention of being a person whose books are all contained in an e-reader. As a matter of fact, I think e-readers are the devil.

Why? Well, there are many reasons, but the biggest one is that they are putting bookstores out of business.

Let me repeat that: they are putting bookstores out of business. For book lovers, I don’t know how that’s not the end of the argument right there, but somehow it isn’t. It seems that after years of reading the printed word, book lovers have suddenly found it inconvenientthat books are, you know, objects. With mass. And weight. And apparently, the desires not to carry things under five pounds and for more room in their bags have seduced them towards these bookstore-destroying e-readers.

Back in the days when You’ve Got Mail portrayed big bookstore chains as the enemy, I never imagined that I’d be defending Barnes and Noble as fervently as I have been, but here I am lamenting that aside from college bookstores, there is now exactly one Barnes and Noble in the entire city of Boston. Borders is now long-gone, slain by the e-Reader phenomenon. The Boston area does, at least, have a good number of used and independent bookstores, but I miss having options for book superstores, where you could settle into a chair and read and where you KNEW they’d have the book you were looking for.

There are plenty of other reasons, of course. I don’t think the experience of reading should feel like looking at a computer, which I do all day long at work. You can’t lend eBooks to your friends. You can’t have them signed by your favorite authors at readings. If you have kids, your kids will have no idea what you’re reading if they see you on your Kindle or Nook and won’t ask about it or try to read it themselves. E-readers might spare you some embarrassment if you’re reading 50 Shades of Grey in public, but they also spare you the shared experience of someone else who’s read the book bonding with you. And you can’t hand your favorite eBooks down to your children and grandchildren.

There’s also the matter of Amazon being a bully towards publishers. Here’s what they’ve been doing to Hachette Books recently. If you have a Kindle, you’re supporting this—so for the love of God, at least get a Nook if you absolutely MUST have an e-reader.

I’ll admit that there are a few upsides to e-readers aside from the more-room-in-the-bag thing. eBooks are less expensive to produce, so they allow publishers to release books that wouldn’t see the light of day otherwise. I actually do have a Nook for PC on my laptop because I wanted to read this book by Lois Duncan, a sequel to Who Killed My Daughter?, which is only available in eBook format. eBooks also help authors because they don’t have to worry about losing money from used book sales.

But that’s it. I can’t warm up to the idea of e-readers because I just keep getting stuck on the bookstore thing. I do not want to live in a world without bookstores. Browsing a bookstore and flipping through pages of a book I haven’t read is one of my greatest pleasures in life. A couple of years ago, Ann Patchett (an author whom I’ve seen speak twice and who is as talented at speaking as she is at writing, which isn’t always the case with famous writers) appeared on The Colbert Report and spoke about how, since her hometown of Nashville no longer had a bookstore, she’d opened one herself. She thought the community needed somewhere to have conversations about books and have story time for kids and get recommendations from actual people. In a wonderful bit of wisdom that applies to so many things besides buying books, she said, “If you never, ever talk to people and you meet all of your needs on the Internet, you wake up one day and you’re the unabomber.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Look, I’m not saying you’re a bad person if you have an e-reader (really, I think more than half the people I know have one), but I am saying that you should think about the consequences of the choices you’re making. Because when bookstores are all gone and buying online is our only option and there’s nowhere to go and browse and we’ve all turned into little unabombers? Well, I hope you enjoy all that extra room in your bag.

Ode to the Juno

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I’m moving on the 31st, only about a mile away. I’m going to be living alone for the first time, which I’m really excited about. Eventually I might change that by getting a cat.

Until then, though, I’ll be living without a cute furry thing for the first time in three years. That’s because for those three years, I’ve been living with my roommate and her dog, Juno.

 

Juno, in my humble opinion, is the best dog ever. She’s probably a flat-coated retriever, and she loves you. Really. Even if she doesn’t know you, she loves you. Because she loves EVERYBODY. It doesn’t matter who you are. If you are a human, she loves you.

We should all be more like Juno.

I like to think she loves me more than the average human, though. I love her so much. I love how she likes to cuddle even in 90-degree heat. I love how she never stops wagging her tail. I love how she’d rather have attention than dog food and is always rolling on her back begging for a belly rub. I love how she’s six years old but still acts like a puppy. I love that she thinks she’s a lapdog despite being sixty pounds. I love how many kisses she gives. I love how excited she is to see me when I get home.

I have a lot of nicknames for her: Junebug, Puppy-girl, The Black Furball of Need, Princess Waggytail, Cuddles McFurry, You Ridiculous Beast. She doesn’t call me anything, but I call myself her Backup Human. If she could talk, as I’ve said before, I’m pretty sure she’d be singing a song that goes something like, “I’m the cutest! I’m the cutest! I’m the cutest!” (It’s not a very complicated song because she’s not a very complicated dog.) But she does have very high self-esteem.

She’s super quiet, though, which I appreciate. She very rarely barks, and when she does, it’s usually because she saw a cat out the window.

I never had a dog or a cat or any pets aside from fish growing up- my parents are just not pet people. This was the first time I’d ever lived with an animal, and living with her improved my quality of life immeasurably. During the manhunt for the Boston Marathon bomber, I spent a lot of the day anxiously petting her on the couch and thinking she’d make a great therapy dog.

No, even the best dog ever isn’t perfect. She sheds like crazy. She’s ridiculously needy and completely shameless. The firefighters down the street give her treats, which she knows, so one day when I was walking her, she saw that the firehouse door was open and yanked my arm out of the socket and the next thing I knew, I was in the firehouse, awkwardly standing there like, “Uh…hi. My dog wants a treat?” And she is the lickiest dog I’ve ever met in my life- while I like getting puppy kisses, my friends are not such big fans and I constantly have to tell her, “Juno, I know you love everybody but that does not mean you have to kiss everybody.” But even so, someday in the distant future I want my own dog, but I feel really bad for that hypothetical future dog—Juno has set the bar really high. It’s going to be hard to find a dog who’s half as awesome as she is.

I’m going to miss you, Juno. Keep being the best dog ever, and it has been a privilege to be your Backup Human.

I Sincerely Hope This Is Not the Last Post of Its Kind I Write

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I mentioned this back in this post, but last year, I had a short story accepted by The Sierra Nevada Review, a literary magazine out of Sierra Nevada College.

The day before Easter, my contributor’s copies came in the mail!

It’s a pretty short story—about 1100 words and only three pages. It’s called “Things You Don’t Know I Know About You.” In the story, the narrator, a nameless cubicle dweller, tells of everything she’s learned about her coworkers by Googling them. This is something that, I admit, I do all the time—with coworkers, dates, random people from the past, and sometimes my friends and family, just to see what I find. My friends think I’m weird for Googling people before dates—I think they’re weird for not doing it. (Of course, then on the date I have to act like I don’t know things like where the guy went to college or where he works.) But I’ve found out some interesting things by Googling people from the past I think of randomly—like, there was this obnoxious hipster guy I worked with at an internship in college, and I found out through Google that he wrote a fairly popular young adult book.

It’s not online, but you can buy a copy here or just ask me if you want to read it.

I’m happy about it—I feel like it’s rare that there’s something in my life I can be legitimately proud of. Even when I accomplish something professionally, like making my sales goal last year, it’s hard to take much pride in it because of extenuating circumstances—like, I think making that goal was due to luck more than anything else. But I can’t think of any reason The Sierra Nevada Review decided to publish this other than that they liked the story—and according to Duotrope, a site that gives information on different literary magazines, it has a pretty low acceptance rate, although I’m not sure how accurate the rate they give is.

But still, I hope this isn’t the last thing I ever publish. This is actually part of a group of linked short stories I want to have published as a book eventually, with some of them published in magazines first. I’m trying to get more stories published now.

Here’s hoping that someday I’ll have more publications to blog about.

This Is our F***ing City

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I know I’m a week late on this, but I could not let the occasion of the Red Sox winning the World Series pass by without commenting on it here.

Here’s me after the Sox won in 2004 for the first time in eighty-six years:

I’d just bought the hat that day. It had dawned on me that I didn’t have a Sox hat and I wanted to be wearing one if the Sox won the World Series that night.

And I was wearing it in 2007, and again last week.

The rest of Boston sports I can take or leave (and I still kind of dislike the Patriots), but I love the Red Sox. It’s funny, but I strongly associate the Sox with me creating this blog. I distinctly remember that right around when I started this blog, I was really worried about Jon Lester, who’d just been diagnosed with cancer. Seven years later, he’s been cured, has won the World Series twice, and mostly been a pretty awesome pitcher.

I can’t believe that after such a long drought, we’ve now won three World Series in nine years. And I was thinking how all three wins followed a disappointing year- 2004 was after the disastrous Aaron Boone ALCS of 2003, 2007 was after a year where the Sox fell apart in August and September (right when I started this blog), and this year, it followed the worst year for the Sox in recent memory. Worst to first feels pretty good.

There’s been a lot written about how this championship also happened after the Marathon bombings. I’m kind of hesitant to contribute to that because while sports certainly boost people’s spirits…it’s still just sports, and doesn’t change all that happened last April. But sports do bring people together in both the best and worst of times, and with all the negative things that sports contribute to society, their power to foster togetherness is one big positive.

This is our f***ing city. Until next year, go Sox!

Some Good Things

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It’s been a bit since my last post, and I’ll write about something more interesting pretty soon. Sometimes it’s hard to find things to write about when life is good. Which it is right now, I’m happy to report. Not because of one huge reason (I’m still single, sadly), but lots of things are going right lately. And it can be obnoxious to talk about how great your life is (see this article!), but on a blog about my life, I do want to share what’s going on with me.

So here are some reasons I’ve been happy lately:

-One of my goals for the year was to write more fiction, and I have. A long time ago, I used to try submitting short stories to magazines, but after awhile I just…stopped. Until this year, when I started submitting a couple of stories around. Recently, I found out that one of them was accepted! My short story “Things You Don’t Know I Know about You” is forthcoming in The Sierra Nevada Review, and it will be out in May. Yea!

-I made my sales goal at work, which means I’m getting a bonus in a couple of months.

-I completed a 10K yesterday and got a good time for me! I finished in 53:29, which is a 8:37 pace, faster than I usually run.

-I’ve been better lately about exercising and not eating crap.

-My roommate and I got a better Internet connection. I then joined Netflix, and then I bought a Roku. The Roku has massively improved my life. I’m now catching up with TV shows I should have been watching. Parks and Recreation is now one of my new favorites—I’ll do a post in the near future about everything I’ve been catching up with. Breaking Bad is probably next.

-But I’m not starting Breaking Bad until baseball is over because RED SOX IN THE ALCS WOO!

-It’s fall and the weather is lovely and I recently went apple picking because YEA NEW ENGLAND.

-I’ve picked up a little side project editing college essays for high school kids, and I’m enjoying it.

-The Boston Book Festival is coming up this weekend- I’ve meant to go every other year, but have always been busy. This is the first year I’m making it.

-BC’s football team still isn’t great, but they’re at least better than they were last year.

-I saw a great play called The Power of Duff last weekend. After I see a good play, it makes me want to see [Allie Brosh] ALL the theater! [/Allie Brosh] So maybe there’s more theater for me in the near future.

-Speaking of Allie Brosh, her book is coming out at the end of the month!

-My friends are awesome, although that’s not new.

-My furry friend is also awesome.

Quote Wheels

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Since high school, I have collected quotes. My senior year, I started keeping a list of quotes inside my locker. All kinds of quotes: song lyrics, quotes from books, lines from movies and TV shows, funny things my friends and relatives said, Bible quotes, cheesy sayings that resonated with me nonetheless. As the year went on, my friends gave me suggestions for what to include, and I added to it as I went.

Before college, as I was arming myself with dorm room decorations (including a poster from the first Harry Potter movie and another of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night”), I decided that I wanted to display the quotes in a more “artistic” way. So I got some white posterboard and skinny Crayola markers, traced a bowl on the posterboard, cut out a circle, and wrote out the quotes in a spiral. And thus the “quote wheel” was born!

(I’ve been meaning to write this post forever, by the way. It was Christiana Krump’s idea. She mentioned it in a comment almost three years ago!)

I just thought it would be a fun thing to hang up in my dorm room, but the friends I made throughout college LOVED it. And college lends itself to quotes—I mean, this was back in the days of AIM away messages, which were made for both melodramatic quotes and the funny things your friends say. So the quote wheels expanded, and eventually I made separate “BC quote wheels” made entirely of funny things my friends said.

Here are some notable quotables, and a glimpse at where my mind was at from the fall of 2001 to the spring of 2006:

Song Lyrics

“In the end, only kindness matters.”

-My high school yearbook quote, from “Hands” by Jewel

“Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.”

-“Closing Time” by Semisonic—a standard quote for a graduating senior.

“Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.”

-“Beautiful Boy” by John Lennon

Books

“You ever wonder what a Martian might think if he happened to land near an emergency room? He’d see an ambulance whizzing in and everybody running out to meet it, tearing the doors open, grabbing up the stretcher, scurrying along with it. ‘Why,’ he’d say, ‘what a helpful planet, what kind and helpful creatures.’ He’d never guess we’re not always that way; that we had to, oh, put aside our natural selves to do it.”

-from The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler

“It is our choices, Harry, that show who we truly are, far more than our abilities.”

-from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

“The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved, loved for ourselves, or rather loved in spite of ourselves.”

-from Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

Movies

“Talking about love is like dancing about architecture.”

-from Playing by Heart

“Thank God for the model trains, because if it wasn’t for those they wouldn’t have got the idea for the big trains.”

-from A Mighty Wind

“Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.”

-from Forrest Gump

TV Shows

“Joey takes naked pictures of us and then he eats chicken and he looks at them!”

-Rachel on Friends

“It’s like you took a gun and stabbed me in the back right in front of my eyes!”

-Shawn on Boy Meets World

“Never give up on a miracle.”

-Mulder to Scully on The X-Files

Funny things my friends/relatives say

“You should ask Caroline to show you her new breast.”

-My mom to my dad—our swim coach was showing my sister a new way to do breaststroke, and my mom didn’t realize how that sounded until I pointed it out to her.

Me: We get Easter Monday off…what is Easter Monday, anyway?
Caroline: I don’t know, I think it’s the day where everyone just kind of sat back and said, “Damn, that was a cool thing he did!”

“Damn, I would have been so cool if I had lived in the early nineties!”

-My sister (born in 1986)

Me Being Dumb

“Wow! There’s a big thing of ice!”

-Referring to a pond I saw in the distance from a mountaintop when I was skiing

“The most investigated performer…that must mean…he did something BAD!”

-Me reasoning my way through a Trivial Pursuit question

Cheesy Anonymous Quotes that Resonated Nonetheless

“Everything is always okay in the end, so if it’s not okay, it is not yet the end.”

“To the world you may be one person, but to one person, you may be the world.”

“Don’t criticize someone until you walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you do criticize them, you’ll be a mile away and have their shoes!” (Yes, I realize this one is grammatically incorrect.)

Miscellaneous Quotes

“Be who you are and say what you think because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.”
-Dr. Seuss

“Sad. Nothing more than sad. Let’s not call it a tragedy; a broken heart is never a tragedy. Only untimely death is a tragedy.”

-Angela Carter

“People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something that one finds. It is something that one creates.”

– Thomas Szasz

BC Quotes!

“There’s this girl in my philosophy class who has the same scarf as me except mine’s red and hers is blue, and I just want to go up to her and say, ‘Hey, we have the same scarf except mine’s red and yours is blue.”

“And on the seventh day, God COULDN’T rest…he created Oompa-Loompas!”

“Ben’s in Worcester and Dave’s in Washington and I gave up alcohol for Lent, so I have nothing and no one to do this weekend!”

Two Weeks in August

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Well, I’ve had a crazy couple of weeks—good-crazy, though. I spent a week in Dallas for my company’s national sales meeting, flew home, was home for about twelve hours, and then went back to the airport to go to DC, where Erin and I stayed with Jackie and hung out with Tiana and Pam. Here are some of the highlights from the past two weeks:

    • ·         I ate an insane amount of Tex-Mex and cheesecake in Dallas and drank a ridiculous amount of free alcohol.
    • ·         I learned that putting my right thumb on top when I cross my hands makes me “sexy” rather than “sneaky.”
    • ·         I toured Dallas Cowboys stadium with my work team. I admit that I wasn’t that excited about it when I first heard about it, but being out on the field in this HUGE stadium was actually pretty cool.
    • ·         I swam in a hotel pool that had a freaking swim-up bar! Best way ever to celebrate my sessions for the week being done.
    • ·         I crossed an item off my bucket list by riding an mechanical bull! And I have video evidence:
  • ·         I went to the Newseum with Erin and Jackie, where you can easily spend a whole day.
  • ·         Erin and I met Pam for lunch. Pam, after being surprised to hear that Dawson’s Creektook place in Massachusetts: “I don’t know things I should know.”
  • ·         Erin, Pam and I went to the Holocaust Museum, which was horrifying and intense.
  • ·         Then we decided to get pedicures, and Jackie was going to join us. After Jackie texted Erin to say that we should walk to 14thStreet, Erin said, “We’re on 7th. How far is it?” Jackie: “Well, it’s seven blocks.”
  • You know how sometimes when you’re not quite asleep, a weird thought enters your mind? Before bed, we saw a notice in Jackie’s apartment lobby that said that an exterminator was coming the next day. So, not quite dreaming, I thought, “What if the exterminator comes while Erin and I are still asleep and tries to exterminate us? Like, hmm, here are two rather large bugs?”
  • ·         The next day we met up with Tiana and went to the National Zoo, which was awesome and FREE. There were pandas!
  • ·         We also really wanted ice cream but couldn’t find any except what was in vending machines. Erin really wanted a chipwich but somehow the vending machine gave her Scribblers instead. The look on her face when she opened them was priceless.
  • ·         Then we went back to Tiana’s place to get her car and met her adorable (and HUGE) Tibetan mastiff, Kiro. He was very happy to make new friends and cuter than anything in the zoo!
  • ·         Then we drove up to Baltimore to see the Sox/Orioles game. The game didn’t go so well, but Camden Yards is a nice park! It was my first time seeing a Sox game anywhere other than Fenway.
  • ·      The next day Erin and I met up with my friend and former chorus buddy Amy, then headed to the airport to get ourselves back home.
Back to life now. Time to squeeze in as much summer-y goodness as I can before summer’s officially over!

1/2 + 1/2 = ?

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Yesterday, I completed my second half-marathon, this time in Boston. Megan also ran it—her first half-marathon—and did awesome!

Here we are at the finish.

This course was hilly and difficult, much harder than the Princess race—the hardest part of that one was getting up at 3 AM. But I’m really happy to say I finished with a respectable time, although it wasn’t as fast as I wanted it to be due to the heat. I really do not do well exercising in heat—that’s one reason I did swimming for so long, I think! But yesterday was unseasonably hot out—80 degrees in Boston in October! WTF? I want my nice fall weather! So while I made really good time for the first eight miles, I hit a wall when we had to run uphill over a bridge where there was no shade, and around Mile 11 I threw up. I think I may have had a bit of heat exhaustion—it wasn’t until after I finished and got some Gatorade that I started to feel better. As much of a pain as training in the winter for the Princess race was, it was MUCH easier than running in the heat. But I’m really happy that after that unfortunate detour I was still able to finish!

I have to say, though, it will be awhile before I attempt another half-marathon—I’m thinking next fall I might do one in Newton, but my next athletic attempt will probably be an open-water swim. While I was training for this race, I ended up neglecting other forms of exercise I love—swimming, yoga, Zumba, classes at the gym like Pilates and abs workouts. While I enjoy running, I don’t live and breathe it like a lot of serious runners do. I’ve heard people talk about getting a “runner’s high,” and I have no idea what that is. Actually, when I run I get more angry than anything else—my mind tends to wander and I imagine scenarios, and by the end of the run I’m mad at someone for something that never happened.

This is the thing, though: never in a million years did I think that I’d be someone who completed two half-marathons in less than eight months. If you check my bucket list, I talk about the open-water swim and eventually a triathlon (although I have some serious catching up to do with cycling before I can do one of those), but nothing about running. I did JV track for three years in high school, but I never thought of myself as A Runner. As a kid, I knew adults who were serious runners—so serious that they wouldn’t do a popular two-mile race in my hometown because “it’s only two miles,” and I used to roll my eyes at that. Now, I can actually relate to that mentality.

I wish someone would tell this to high school and college students. When it comes to sports, it’s so easy to feel like whatever you are as a teenager is what you’ll be for the rest of your life—in my case, mediocre swimmer and girl-who-only-does-JV-track-so-she’s-doing-something-during-the-offseason. But none of that really matters after you graduate—after that, you don’t do anything for scholarships or to get colleges’ attention, but just because you want to. Look at me—I always thought of myself as a terrible athlete as I was growing up, and I still don’t consider myself a good one, but here I am doing two half-marathons in a year, thinking about doing another one, and hoping to do at least a couple of shorter road races by the end of the year.

If you didn’t know me, you might think that perhaps I actually am A Runner. I certainly don’t think of myself that way, but the point is that if I wanted to be A Runner, I could be.

A Moving Story

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On Labor Day, I was sitting on Boston Common reading, and I was getting a little claustrophobic. There were people everywhere. Whenever I got up, I felt like I was going to trip over people.

Labor Day is a mystifyingly popular weekend for tourists to visit Boston. Personally, I can’t think of a worse time to visit our fair city. There are something like fifty colleges in or right around Boston, and over Labor Day weekend, the students at all of them are moving their shower caddies and extra-long twin sheet sets into their dorm rooms. Not to mention all the twenty- and thirty-somethings who are just switching to new apartments with 9/1 move-in dates.

I challenge you to find one twenty-something who has lived in one place for the duration of his or her twenties. I’m certainly no exception. I turned twenty just before my junior year of college, when I lived on campus in a four-person apartment. Over the summer I moved home, and senior year I lived in a different, six-person apartment. The following summer, I worked an on-campus job and lived in a different dorm room. Then I moved home for a month, after which I moved into my first apartment. After two years there, I moved to Davis Square. And at the end of July, I moved again, still in the Davis area.

I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to blog about this. Maybe because even after nearly two months, I’m not completely settled in yet. I still need a bookshelf, a dining room table, to get a few small boxes into my room, to give away some of the books I didn’t want, and to get rid of the boxspring that’s sitting in the dining room. Oh, yeah, did I mention? My new bedroom is up a flight of stairs, and I should have realized beforehand that my boxspring wouldn’t fit up those stairs. So I ended up having to sleep on just my mattress for a month, then figure out a time when Ikea could deliver a platform bed, then figure out a time when my dad could help me put it together.

Here’s the thing: even though I’ve moved twelve times, including in and out of dorm rooms, since I turned eighteen, I absolutely suck at moving. I can never figure out the most efficient way to pack. I always end up with random objects that don’t fit anywhere. I underestimate the amount of packing space I need, largely due to the hundreds of books I own (and my refusal to buy an e-Reader). If I’m using a moving van, I never get everything packed in time. If I’m using a car, it ends up so full that things fall out when I open the doors.

Is this a skill you can get better at? I like my new apartment, but I’m definitely not going to live here for the rest of my life. Am I always going to be moving-deficient, or is it possible that things could go better next time? (Actually, it would be hard for things not to go better—when I moved, due to sheer bad luck, it was literally the hottest day of the year.)

In the meantime, I love my new apartment. I’ve got a nice, quiet bedroom, Comcast cable with a DVR, a nice porch out back for reading the Globe on weekends, a very cool new roommate, and this lovely lady greeting me every day when I come home:

Yep, my new roommate has a dog! Juno is a three-year-old black furball (probably with a lot of flat-coated retriever in her) who loves everybody in the world almost as much as she loves attention. I love to pet cute dogs. She’s a cute dog who loves to be petted. It works out great.

Caroline’s Birthday

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Twenty-five years ago today, I met someone. Whenever people had asked two-year-old me what I wanted to name the baby, I said something very quickly that sounded like “Dickynup.” But I seemed to be fine with the name my parents had picked out for my new sister, Caroline Elizabeth, whom I called “baby Caroyine.”

I wish I had a scanner so I could upload a picture of us as kids. She was adorable, and still is. Here’s a picture of us during the Princess Half-Marathon earlier this year.

She’s the blonde one on the right who looks nothing like me and is insanely proud of being a couple of inches taller than me.

Like most siblings, we had a lot of fights growing up. But we also had a lot of fun. When I went to preschool, she cried hysterically about how she wanted her “Kaykie.” We used to play with our gigantic collection of stuffed animals in my room on Saturday mornings. We’d play out in the backyard, inventing all kinds of crazy games (one of which involved pretending to be vultures). We share a kind of weirdness in our personalities that only siblings can understand.

As we got older, we got to be a different kind of friends. We talked about boys, vented about people at school, complained about teenage issues. We hung out by going to the movies or watching The X-Files together instead of playing in the backyard. We made fun of the characters on Law & Order: SVU. Eventually, she decided to go to BC, where she was a freshman when I was a senior, and I loved having her on the same campus as me. She was in the honors program and on the swim team, met a great boyfriend, and continued being her awesome self.

Today she turns twenty-five. I still call her by the embarrassing family nicknames she’d kill me for revealing here. She’s in her second year at Villanova Law School, where she’s involved with student government. She’s still with the same boyfriend. She trips over everything in her path, but always gets right back up and laughs at herself. She loves puns, Martha Stewart’s recipes, and Popsicles. She’s still adorable and hilarious, and I miss having her in the same city as me.

Happy birthday to the best little sister ever. I love you.