Okay, next week we will have some sound up on the site and you will be able to listen to other people’s stories. For right now here is a story to hold you over:

When I was in college I bought a Saturn. This was right at the time that Saturns were first introduced on the market and they were selling themselves on their customer service. When you bought a car you got invited down to an annual barbecue and your car was sent a birthday card when it turned one. Much like cabbage patch kids, a cabbage patch kid that you can go 75 mph with on the highway. So I was awkward back then, not like now. Nothing like now. One of the things that Saturns offered was that when you bought it, they put your car in the show room and all of the salespeople on the floor would clap for you and come over and shake your hand. They would then take a picture of you and make you drive it out of the show room. About a week later they would send you a coffee mug with that picture on it.

I might be awkward but I have always been awkward so I have the fine-tuned sensibilities to understand which things in life will draw ridicule and which are safe. A mug of yourself=ridicule. A mug of yourself with a bunch of salespeople clapping for you while you look like you might die=ridicule. I did the logical thing and I hid the mug deep in a closet. To have hidden it less well would’ve risked one of my parents finding it and deciding to bring it to work to use there as a mug. Ridicule that I wouldn’t even be able to defend against.

As time passed, I became more distant from the awkward teenager in me and more familiar with the awkward adult in me. I rediscovered the mug. What had once been mortifying was now comic gold. I realized as I stood in work at the water cooler drinking coffee out of a mug with my face on it how humorless your adult years must be if you truly succeed in getting rid of the evidence of your embarrassing past. I wouldn’t have that New Kids on the Block CD and t-shirt, any pictures of me at 13 years old at Disneyworld wearing a giant Donald Duck hat, or in high-school dressed for marching band. And I wouldn’t have anything good to drink coffee out of.