Footnotes are stupid. They’re superfluous.

n 2003, I accidentally dated an alcoholic. He came as an accessory on my Prius. I got to know handsome Johnny O. (not his whole name) while I awaited the delivery he promised in four days. And during the four weeks I was dropping in on the dealership to check on my anticipated Prius, he began courting me in a car man kind of way, demonstrating how his smart key could open my vehicle without even touching it, showing me how to change the oil, change a tire, hot wire a car, skills I’d never use, but I liked the way he was teaching me. He would worry, he said, if I were abandoned along a roadside somewhere: fearful, cheerless, Johnny O.-less. This man rolled the odometer back on my feminism thirty years. Single and celibate, I suddenly got hormonal, helpless and girly.

We’re driving on whatever the hell the name of the main road is that goes through Paris and I have to piss. There’s six of us in a car—me, my girlfriend, her friend Katty, Katty’s husband’s mother who has a name that I forget as soon as she says it, a dog named Ramses (I’m serious), and Katty’s husband’s father who will not let me piss. I think it’s a gas issue. He’s worried that if we exit, we might end up driving around for a bit looking for a place for me to relieve myself, so he’s telling me to hold it in. Except he’s doing this in French and no one speaks English in the entire car other than me and my girlfriend.

I’ve recently come to the realization that I say I’m sorry because I lack self-confidence, self-worth, and self-respect. I’m starting to understand that if I’m going to get serious about really loving myself, just as I am, I am going to have to stop apologizing for everything. So you will understand that I have nothing to say about having just crashed your car into a telephone pole.

Some people have an elegant stride that turns heads while it enhances physical fitness. You do not. If you insist upon running in public, you need to listen to me because when I was seven years old I watched Frank Shorter and his mustache compete in the Olympic marathon on ABC television. I got up and ran around the block until my thighs wore new fringe into my Levi cords cut-offs. My PF Flyers were patched with blood. The feet on my striped Hang Ten tank top bounced and twisted over my sweaty orbs.