I don't understand the question. And I won't respond to it.

What TV show reunion would you most like to see?

if you like it, then you shoulda put your butt on it*

The first time I remember making someone laugh so hard that they lost control of their bodily functions was years and years ago, when I was on vacation with my family. We were all gathered at my great aunt's house, sitting around a large table in her backyard. Midway through dinner, I burped, long and loud like Buddy the Elf had inhabited my body. My uncle had to sprint from the table, beer shooting out of his mouth. I was eight.

Thus began my long career of trying to out-Chandler Bing everyone in the room. I was that little girl perfecting her Babs Bunny imitation on the playground at recess. I was that person sitting in the back of the classroom, cracking jokes that only those sitting next to me could hear. I'm that woman who talks about poop and dog barf on her blog, immature, yes, but it's FOR THE LAUGHS, PEOPLE.

Honestly, I haven't felt very compliment-worthy lately but I've had enough people tell me I'm funny to believe that, sure, sometimes I'm good for a laugh. I once made my mom laugh so hard that she peed a little and another time Joe LITERALLY almost passed out because he was laughing so hard at something I did/said that he couldn't catch his breath. I don't remember what I said either of those times. If I did, knowing me, I'd run it into the ground until it wasn't funny anymore. For an example of this, I submit Exhibit A: my blog.

I also talk about farting a lot, so kids think I'm hilarious.

ANYWAY. Here are some actual funny people. I know they're For Real Funny** because they get paid for it:









*I also change certain words in pop songs to "butt" or "poop" WOULD YOU LIKE TO HIRE ME TO SING AT YOUR WEDDING?
**except for Horatio Sanz

Laich it Arnott, that call was Fehr. (Don't ask.)

I'm not a girl very often complimented; the last came, oh, I can't even remember when. Because they are few and far between in consequence they are remembered, and what I remember is this: the one thing on which I am very most--exclusively, even--complemented is my shoes.

I wish I had a better answer for you kind people but I do not know how to make sensible lawyer shoes very interesting.

Oh wait, maybe I do:

I see you driving around town with the girl I love and I'm like "forget you!"

I'm rather good at complimenting myself: an obsession with mirrors, a list of ways I can do my very best every day, a self-congratulatory points system. It is rather unbelievable really and makes it hard to distinguish what is actually said to me. Fact: not a lot (which is for the best really).

But as a child, I had this thing, that after repetition I adopted as my proudest trait. A party trick, a legacy, a sign of maturity. "Like a steel trap!" my mom would exclaim at least once a week and I would curate it, display it, and exercise it. My steel trap. It knows yesterday's news and the day before that and the day before that, and my class schedules in college, and the most important things promised to me when I was 18.

I remember you too. I remember what you were afraid of yesterday, and what you said you'd change, and what you hoped you'd become. I remember your lies too even if I didn't know them to be so, and all these things I remember are my own bible, chapters and verses that can be underlined, analyzed, and memorized again.

I don't forget things. This makes me a very valuable employee, and a sometimes harmful friend. Over the years, it's weaned and waned and I've learned somewhere in the back of pensieve to bottle up certain things. Grace has let me move past a few moments, but otherwise I carry the past around with me.

It's not easy being sure. It's not easy being the only holder of so many memories. The only estate trustee, the only living relative. But it's a rare enough trait that at least it's admired, even if if makes me feel so, so alone.

I sometimes find, and I am sure you know the feeling, that I simply have too many thoughts and memories crammed into my mind... At these times... I use the Pensieve. One simply siphons the excess thoughts from one's mind, pours them into the basin, and examines them at one's leisure.

Unbraiding in the Sun

Have passed, I thought, a Whip lash
Unbraiding in the Sun
When stooping to secure it
It wrinkled, and was gone--

The thing I get complimented about most is my niceness, and it’s the easiest compliment to accept because it’s a really true thing to say. I’m nice. Super nice. Purposefully, proactively, perpetually nice. It’s not an act. It’s just the truth of who I am: one part Southern belle, one part theological black sheep, one part redemption-seeking twat.

In my early 20s I realized I was a prophet Isaiah girl. Not dour, really. More like: hyper-aware of needing my heart cleaned, and hyper-aware of all the broken hearts around me. I made what you might call a covenant, if you’re into Old Testament lingo, that I would do the thing Jesus said he was meant to do (the thing Isaiah said Jesus would say he was meant to do): Bind up broken-hearted people, proclaim freedom from darkness for captives, comfort folks who mourn, provide for folks who grieve.

I’d be lying if I said my faith is the same today as it was a decade ago when I made that promise, but when I was 23 I said to God, “I want to want to mend the broken-hearted, and I want to be equipped to do it.”

And on that day, on that very day, I started transforming from One Of The Biggest Pricks You’ve Ever Seen to One Of The Nicest People You’ll Ever Know.

I can’t help it.

I can’t help knowing exactly what’s happening to strangers who brush up against me, and I can’t help knowing exactly what to do comfort them, and I can’t help doing the thing that needs to be done. I’ve ignored it sometimes. I can think of six time I’ve ignored it, in fact, and I know the memories of those broken-hearted will haunt my living and waking nightmares for the rest of my life. I see them in my mind’s eye as clearly as if they were sitting beside me now: the lines on their faces, the callouses on their hands, the grumble of their empty bellies. One man’s dog starving beside him, both sharing a blanket under an overpass in a rainstorm in Munch. He needed ten Euros. Twenty maybe. I bought a beer stein I lost before I even flew home.

Not too terribly long ago I met with a digital executor, a lady who asked me a lot of tedious questions about what will happen to the online Heather Anne Hogan when the flesh and blood Heather Anne Hogan doesn’t exist anymore. There’s my Twitter, my Tumblr, my Facebook. There's my Flickr, my LiveJournal, my domain. There's my email. There's a hundred other things. What do I preserve and what should die along with me?

The digital executor said, “What do you want your legacy to be?”

I’m not unfamiliar with the snake, that narrow fellow in the grass. So I said the thing I’ve known for a while, that I want people to remember me for being nice.

“‘Nice’ isn’t much of a legacy,” she said.

I wrestled with it. I turned it over in my brain. I grappled it, strong-armed it, kicked it around it. I assaulted it. No one remembers nice guys. Nice guys finish last. I met her again a week later, this woman in charge of laying to rest the online Heather Anne, and I said, “I’m OK with nice. I’m OK without a legacy.”

I don’t remember the name of the guy who saved me from a ten-mile ride on my Strawberry Shortcake bike the first time I ran away from home at five years old. I don’t remember the name of the lady who said, “Don’t lip sync; your voice is angelic” at my first choral competition. I don’t remember the name of the coach at the basketball camp in Tennessee who spent seven hours teaching me the footwork for the crossover that got me into college. I don’t remember the name of the lady who bought me a full tank of gas when I was trying to get to Florida to bring my sister home to me. Or the Sunday School teacher who held my hand as I cried at the altar the day my parents announced their divorce. Or the guy who carried me out of the mountain bike trail the first time I crashed alone.

Oaks of righteousness, Isaiah said of broken-heart menders. A planting of the Lord for the display of his splendour.

Niceness is the truth of me. And here is another one: My Facebook won’t survive — but I think my acorns will.