As I plow through a memoir I'm doing (don't worry—it's more memoiristic because it's not "I was born, then I did this, then I did that"), I have started to peek back at the elaborate journals I kept from high school through about 2001. Why I didn't push myself to keep it in order to record minute details of my time as a teen-mag editor, I'll never know. (Luckily, I have a good memory.) But just reading some of the stuff I wrote as a teen and twentysomething has been pretty cringe-inducing: I was a melodrama queen.

One thing I noticed is that today—August 21—is the 20th anniversary of my move to NYC. I descrbed it as "big, dirty and intimidating," but was superhappy to be here. I've never seriously considered leaving, even though it's outrageously expensive, is still big, dirty and intimidating and part of it was blown up before my very eyes 11 years ago.

Trivia: I keep all my movie stubs (no idea why), and in my journals, it appears the last movie I went to see in Chicago was A League of Their Own, while the first in NYC was Unlawful Entry—no, the latter was not a post-condom/pre-condomless porno, but a terrible Kurt Russell/Ray Liotta movie that I saw with my Madonna-collecting pal Lori DeVito. I believe we had to leave in the middle due to a miscalculation of where she or I had to be after, or maybe it was just because the meter was expiring. No great loss.

And yeah, I'll come up with better stories than what movies I saw 20 years ago for the book.