1. What is the nicest thing anyone has ever done for you?

When Deon Sanestevans apologized to me for the months of torture during junior high school, it was the nicest thing that anyone has done for me. I haven’t told this story yet. I guess I should someday and you’ll understand.

2. What’s the nicest thing you’ve done for someone else?

Senior year in high school, I was on the staff of the Literary Magazine. It meant that we went to class every other day, wrote teen angst poems, judged the teen angst of  our peers and worked our butts off getting our magazine published. Dawni Burton Hatch was in the class with me. Mike Pinkston was in the class with me. Candy Jeffs was in the class with me.

I’ve never talked about Candy Jeffs before. She lives in <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />Salt Lake again and I have seen her recently. She has been known to read this blog, but I feel like I have to be honest. When we were in high school, the last thing I wanted was to be seen with Candy Jeffs. I wanted to be cool. I was a punk rock bitch and having a Mormony girl like Candy Jeffs follow me around was an irritant.

I always felt guilty for snubbing Candy. I’ve never seen Flatliners, but I’ve been told that Keifer Sutherland was haunted by past taunts of a girl during his school years. I was haunted that way. Several years later, Candy was back from college for the summer and got a job at the same K-Mart that I worked at. I confessed how sorry I felt about treating her poorly during high school.

She told me that she didn’t think I treated her poorly. She was glad that I let her hang out with me. I was never overtly mean to her. She saw our time in high school together as a happy time and she was grateful for my association. I didn’t mean to, but the nicest thing I’ve done was just let someone be my friend. Now, I am grateful for her friendship as an adult.

3. What one thing do you wish you had done?

I wish I had been braver. I wish I had told more guys that I loved them. It was so easy to love back then. The older I get, the fewer people I love. I wish I had told more people that I liked them. It was so easy to just casually like people back then. The older I get, the fewer people I can even tolerate, much less like.

4. What is your biggest regret?

My biggest regret is that it took me so long to let myself be a writer. I knew I wanted to be a writer when I was in high school, but I thought that I had to have something to “fall back on.” I wasted a lot of time getting a degree in Mathematics when I could have been honing and refining my writing skills.

5. What is your greatest accomplishment?

I like to think that my greatest accomplishments are still yet to come. Of course, I’m sure that I would feel like that even if I won the Pulitzer Prize, so I guess I should make an assessment of myself as of this date. My greatest accomplishment to date has been finally allowing myself to write and publish my work every day. I was writing every day, but all of it was hidden away. Publishing on this weblog every single day has been my greatest accomplishment so far.