When boiled to the bone, traditional folk songs skew toward the dark side. Below are loglines that summarize the plots of a representative selection of actual folk songs whose lyrics would harsh anyone’s mellow.

Clark had me at “Please don’t be too sketchy”. There were no pictures of the place, which should have alarmed me, but did not. We texted for a little while. He finally sent pictures. Not the Ritz, but cute and economical. I asked to add him on Facebook to ensure he was not a serial killer. In retrospect, I bet Ted Bundy would have had a very endearing internet presence.

An odd thing happened to me last night. I was lying in bed about to fall asleep, when a thought occurred to me.

I thought that, out of all the billions of people in the world, there must be at least one person out there who was, at that very moment, falling in love for the first time. Or, maybe there was more than one person. I couldn’t know for sure.

With all the uncertainty in the world today, I am no longer comfortable making any permanent decisions about which applications my smartphone will automatically use to open certain files or links.

When I was in the fourth grade, I became obsessed with lizards. Anoles, geckos, skinks, iguanas, and even Komodo dragons captured my attention. On the outside, I looked like the other little girls with my blonde pigtails and Disney Princess lunch box. On the inside, I had a reptile obsession. While other kids my age read chapter books and played soccer, I checked out every reptile book in my elementary school library and memorized hundreds of fun facts about lizards.