There is a slight-but-important distinction between the two ideas presented in this title, I swear. Also, hello, welcome to my spooky Christmas story!

Context: I’ve been mostly-in-charge-of-myself (with relatively more successes than failures) for a long time. I’m competent at Not Opening the Door to Strangers. I can use the stove and I know all the different kinds of wounds and how to first-aid them, and to never throw flour on a fire and when to call Emergency Services or Poison Control. In fact, I even have a long and uneventful history of supervising other people. Most of my income from ages 11 to 19 was derived from babysitting—sometimes as many as five tiny people at once. I’m very good at remembering who will eat sandwiches with mustard on them, and who won’t.

Over the years, I’ve proven how very much I’m allowed to be in charge of myself.

Except.

There is one specific area in which I am really, really bad at supervising myself. It’s when I’m asleep.

I’m pretty sure I know what you’re thinking right now, which is that most people don’t actually need very much in-sleep supervision.

And I’ve talked about this before, but I think maybe I didn’t convey how dramatically bad at sleeping I am. I am SO BAD that it’s almost like a joke or an urban legend. Among my distance-friends—anyone who ever has to travel with me, really—it’s become a poorly-understood but generally-accepted phenomenon, kind of like gravity, complete with concise, factual explanations for the benefit of others (Tess) and dramatic reenactments (Maggie).

Sharing a room with me is the kind of thing that no one is just born ready for. It’s an intermediate endeavor. You have to work up to it.

At home, the situation is normalized. It’s fine. I’m married to someone who pretty much takes these things in stride and explains to me (patiently) that no, the ceiling does not in fact have an octopus on it, and the closet is just a closet, and it’s not flooding outside, the water is not higher than the windows.

But sometimes, D has to go out of town for work, and then I’m left unsupervised.

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This isn’t a post about writing books.

Or even a post about responsibility or creativity or the writing life or being gainfully employed.

I mean, it’s kind of about those things? But also, it is so much bigger.

Sometimes I use this blog as a place to talk about my favorite things, and today I’m going to tell you my favorite thing about being an adult.

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The power is on at my house!

Normally, this wouldn’t actually demand any sort of joyous announcement. But the other night, we had this windstorm.*

And then the block went dark.

And then I discovered that even though I’d grown up in a relatively rugged and weather-ready household, as an adult, I was ill-prepared for any sort of actual situation. As it turns out, there were many, many things pertaining to emergency preparedness that as a child, I had come to take for granted.

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I kept trying to make this post be about how, thanks to my dad, I have a fairly decent working knowledge of science fiction, but am not necessarily a science fiction FAN. Mostly because all my favorite sci-fi is still primarily classed as horror. It seriously took me five paragraphs to say that. Which seemed inefficient and off-topic. So I deleted it.

Then I tried to tell you why I like the movie Looper so, so incredibly much. But I wound up telling you the whole plot, because I am a spoiler-monster.

Okay, I’m going to try one more time, starting now.

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This is not a post about inspirations. Also, it is not a post about nostalgia, artistic influences, where I get my ideas, or whether I spent my childhood watching movies I was way too young to be watching.

I’m not sure what it’s about, exactly. Maybe just those moments that seem to loom up out of nowhere to shape someone as an artist or a writer or as a person who thinks and breathes and dreams and lives in the world and grows up there.

I have this indelible memory of seeing Harold and Maude for the first time.

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