I had recently graduated college when Craigslist began to consume my life. I was 28, old enough to remember the joy of sitting in my kitchen with a pen and a cup of coffee, circling help wanted ads in an old-fashioned newspaper. But I don't need to tell you that Craigslist is way better than print classifieds ever were. It’s free, it’s instant, it’s hyper-local. Still, Craigslist does require a certain amount of street smarts; it can be a landmine of check fraud Trojan horses, fake website switcheroos and other gray-area opportunities. This isn’t news, of course. So while you wouldn’t want your grandmother using Craigslist, for fear she’d wire her identity to a Nigerian prince, those of us who’ve grown up with the seediness of the Web realize it’s no big deal. We know what to avoid on the Internet, the same way we know to avoid a dark alley on an unfamiliar street. Well, I thought I knew, anyway.

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I guess I should have expected my extended family to publicly speculate about my sexual orientation. My aunt’s children all attained marital status in their 20s. Believe me, they had no choice: In that circle, you’re nobody until somebody has compromised your surname.

But I’m not just single. At 38 years old, I have never been in a serious relationship. You read that right. That wouldn’t be so embarrassing if I were 20. Or even 27. But after nearly four decades on earth, I have managed to miss out on one of the most essential components of human nature: romantic love.

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Instead of closets, though, I have stuff. Lots and lots of stuff. I have mountains of clothes, from Yumi Kim silk dresses to winter coats to dozens of pairs of fishnets, which live anywhere they can find a home: over doors, chairs and my couch, strewn across the floor, or crammed haphazardly into a dresser drawer. Don't get me started on the towering stacks of books that periodically fall over onto me, or the years' worth of magazine subscriptions, scrap paper, contracts and outdated VHS cassettes.

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"What's wrong?" he asks, concerned by my ashen expression.

I can't tell him that the unwieldy, overstuffed laundry bag is a visual representation of my failure. I am 55 pounds overweight. Having recently hit 221.2 on the scale, I'm no longer forgivably chubby or husky, zaftig or big-boned. I'm not even fat. I've crossed the border into obese, and that is too much for me to bear.

I've been in denial about the number. I argue that, inside, I'm the same person I've always been. But the reality is that I can no longer easily do the things I love. The old, adventurous, unstoppable me decided to run the New York City marathon after one disciplined year of training -- and finished in under five hours. When I met Jeff, I was a fit size 12, going daily to power yoga class. Lately, though, I'm always the biggest person in the studio. Where I used to stand proud and tall at the front, I now hug the wall or lurk behind a pole, hoping to escape notice. It requires courage to take my place in a room packed with bendy bodies in booty shorts; many days, I'm just not brave enough.

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Too bad I wasn't a real psychic.

Actually, I was a failed actor. Long before "Glee" made choir dorks seem cool (or at least profitable), I sang show tunes and mugged my way through high school in unflattering dresses and character shoes. In college, I was cut from my musical theater program, and though I graduated with a bachelor of fine arts, I couldn't be satisfied without a theater degree. My ego needed it.

I also feared that a real job with a desk, entry-level salary and 401(k) would become my permanent station in life -- as if working at an insurance company or bank right out of college would handcuff me to that industry for the next 50 years. So I moved to Las Vegas, which seemed like the perfect place to hide from the grown-up world. Knowing my parents would only support such nonsense if I stayed in school, I enrolled at UNLV -- also known locally as the University of Never Leaving Vegas -- to pursue a master's degree in theater.

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In 1979 I was sentenced to two years in the state penitentiary for my role as a driver for an armed robbery. Between jail time, prison time and work release I spent 17 months incarcerated. Then I went on with my life. I went to college, became a wife and mother and put my outlaw days behind me.

Though I've written about this before, many people in my immediate circle of acquaintances still have no idea. A couple of weeks ago at my university, a colleague gave a talk on prison reform. He was adamant that draconian drug laws had filled the prisons with people who were not criminals and who deserved treatment rather than punishment. He gave several examples of people who were locked up for the relatively minor offense of possession of marijuana and whose lives were ruined by harsh sentences. One young man committed suicide after repeated rapes by other convicts.

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But, the way I saw it, the layoffs changed everything. I was no longer part-time, and flexible hours were out of the question. The deal was off: My only option now was to work week after week of overtime. And so, as I began to plan an important magazine cover shoot for a feature article about 10 overachieving teens, I was determined to effect a change. This shoot was an opportunity not only to prove myself to new colleagues but also to escape from the control of my manipulative creative director, and I hoped to make the most of it.

As it happened, my husband was going away on business that week, leaving me as a single parent for five days leading up to the photo shoot. Even though he traveled frequently, our household could never adjust to his absence. Any upset in my son's routine would result in behavioral problems: He'd cling to me, he'd become cranky and he'd sometimes wet his bed on nights his dad was away.

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But with him gone all the time and my mom, my two sisters and me all vying for his attention, I knew I was going to have to do something big to get noticed. And what could be bigger than jumping out of a cake in a string bikini?

I'd watched a Playboy Bunny do this on TV a few days earlier and it was the first thing that popped into my 10-year-old mind when Dad called to say he would be home for his birthday.

I didn't own a string bikini and had no clue how to make the trick cake that was used on TV. But I concocted a modified version that I was certain would elevate me to favorite-child status.

Early on the morning of Dad's late summer birthday, I recruited my 8-year-old sister, Heidi, to help me make a chocolate cake. Dad wasn't due home until 4 p.m., but I wanted to make sure there was plenty of time to execute my plan.

"What I want you to do is wrap me in a box with the cake and then I'll jump out and surprise him," I told her while we frosted the cake and carefully arranged 37 candles.

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I have always known I talk too much, because people have always told me. They say, "You talk too much." When they're not feeling kind, they also say things like, "Don't you ever shut up?" A boyfriend once looked over at me during a party, and just when I thought he was going to tell me he loved me, he said, "Can you just shut your mouth? Even for a minute?" We're not together anymore.

I have sensed, as I've gotten older, that my loquaciousness isn't always interpreted as bubbly or enthusiastic, as it was when I was younger. I have sensed that it has become toxic, and certainly annoying. In college, when my roommate and a few friends returned from dinner out, I asked how the evening went. My roommate said, "You wouldn't have liked it. It was really laid back and nice." She wasn't being mean when she said that. I think she didn't think of me, maybe rightfully so, as someone who could enjoy a relaxed evening.

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Until fairly recently, the only time my kids saw me reduced to sobs was during the final minutes of "Up" or "Charlotte's Web." Then, in fairly rapid succession, I got cancer, one of my best friends got cancer, and two members of my family died. It's been waterworks ever since. And my kids have been right in the front row for a lot of them.

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"So what does your husband do?" They always notice my ring, a plain platinum band, which I tend to twist absent-mindedly between my right thumb and forefinger during conversation. "Do you have any kids?"

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OK, that's overstating it a bit. I was not absolutely, positively convinced that the world was going to end on Sept. 6, 1994. But for nearly two years, I was absolutely, positively convinced that it might. It was a fear I kept buried inside, aware of how nutty it would sound to everyone else in my life, even as it exacted a punishing emotional toll. There were many signs in my youth of the chronically anxious adult I would become, but this 22-month saga was by far the most dramatic.

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Instead, the cab accelerated into me. I bounced off the hood of the cab and rolled on the ground in the gutter. This was definitely not the standard Chicago standoff I'd expected.

Ultimately, I sprained my ankle and ruptured my Achilles tendon. The sprain was what hurt, but the brutal snap was the tendon. The ruptured Achilles tendon required surgery, four weeks in a cast, four weeks in a boot, and three months of physical therapy. And I noticed another change.

I was afraid.

I started having dreams about the cab hitting me, the hard unyielding bumper hitting my legs, my head bouncing off the hood and then off the asphalt, rolling, scratching my hands up, the pop in my ankle. The way the engine sounded when it revved.

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Dead bodies do get a grayish blue/purple hue because blood pools in the capillaries and the body starts to decompose. It's not smurf blue, but it's not a pleasant shade.

The ultrasound technician moves her transducer over my almost six-month-pregnant belly, sliding easily across the thick gel she's spread there. The gel works as a conductor for the sound waves the transducer is producing in my uterus. Think of bats, a friend told me before the procedure. It's the same kind of sonar. But as those sound waves bounce off bone and tissue and a black-and-white image of my baby appears on the screen, I cannot think of bats. Watching the fuzzy gray heart beat, I can only think of one thing: I want to hold this baby. Now. Forever.

"Do you want to know the sex?" the technician asks, pausing over something that my husband and I cannot identify.

We've already agreed that we do want to know, even though I am already confident this baby is a girl. I don't know why I have such certainty about my pregnancies, but I knew that my first baby was a boy and that this one is a girl.

I am not surprised when the technician announces, "You've got a daughter!"

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I like to think I'm skeptical of email scams, but this one took me by surprise. As it turned out, so-and-so kind of owed me a movie ticket. I'd done her a favor earlier that month. So on that particular day, at that particular time, I didn't raise one eyebrow when I saw the email. I didn't sniff a fraud or send her a message to clarify. What I thought was: Good.

It had only recently struck me that email scams were getting craftier. After years of laugh-out-loud Nigerian hoaxes, chockablock with mangled grammar and outrageous pleas for the secret prince's survival -- hoaxes that only poor, good-hearted old people would ever fall for, at least according to the John Stossel report I watched -- it seemed that scams were becoming harder to suss out. After all, we were moving faster, with less concentration, through more mediums than ever before. The mea culpas from vague acquaintances -- "Sorry, everyone, please ignore that email" -- were becoming a regular fixture of my in box. When two whip-smart co-workers fell for a Facebook scam that promised to show you how you ranked among your friends, well, I knew that could have been me.

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I'd been watching soap operas ever since I was 12. My grandmother got me hooked on "Days of Our Lives" in the midst of the "Marlena gets possessed by the devil" plotline while she was baby-sitting me one summer vacation.

"He's a boy," she told my mother. "He'll like all that violent Satan stuff."

Apparently it never occurred to my grandma that sending me into junior high school talking about Vivian's scheming and the Carrie-Austin-Mike love triangle would be like sending a bleeding man into a shark tank. Luckily, my mom caught the problem before it was too late.

The night before my first day of school she told me, "Look, I'll tape the show for you, but you can't talk about it -- ever -- to anyone."

I agreed. How could I not? Sami's wedding was that week!

As time went on, however, I matured past the over-the-top plotlines and poor writing on "Days" ... and moved over to the nuanced and subtle stories on "All My Children," "One Life to Live" and -- my all-time favorite -- "General Hospital."

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I was about a month into my stressful new job selling radio ads when it happened. I spent my days making demoralizing cold calls that ended in rejection, and my nights trying to forget. The best way I knew to forget involved gorging on delicious food. Specifically Indian food. And donuts.

High on sugar and fat, my friend Jordan, my husband, John, and I set out for a postprandial walk from the donut emporium. We made it several blocks when it became clear something had gone horribly awry in my intestinal track.

"Get the car!" I squeaked to my companions, feeling the pressure mount in my guts and heat course through my body. "Get the car NOW!"

One look at my sweating, bug-eyed face was all the encouragement they needed.

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I love that "assigned text" line all the more for its being sort of affectionately passive-aggressive. It's true that in Mr. White's A.P. Major British Writers, as in every English lit class I took between seventh grade and finishing my B.A., I only did about a third of the reading. Thanks to a finicky nature and what I now recognize as textbook ADHD, reading past Page 3 of a book that didn't immediately hold my interest felt like going to the zoo and being forced to watch the naked mole rats for hours, never being permitted to look in on the giraffes.

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