I’m always a bit amazed by how few other guys possess even basic clothing repair skills – buttons pop off and hems begin to come undone with alarming frequency, and knowing how to fix those small problems before they become bigger ones can save substantial time and money over the long haul.

I owe my ability in such areas to my mother, who, on afternoons home from the office, would occasionally pass along such brief lessons in self-sufficiency. And, in each lesson, as much as I’d learn how to, say, mend an emerging hole, I’d also re-learn that an unused needle should always be threaded with at least a short length of thread.

This second bit was of paramount importance, emphasized heavily along with the story of how my mother’s cousin (or possibly her aunt – I usually tuned out for this oft-told tale) had once not done so, and had stepped on a needle that slipped completely into a vein, coursing along before lodging itself (fortunately) somewhere in her upper leg, thereby avoiding its natural route up to impaling her heart in a Separate Peace sort of tragedy.

While my mother to this day views the needle-in-the-vein story as incontrovertible fact, the more I learned about basic biology, the more I realized there was no way the yarn could actually be true. I mean, veins are remarkably circuitous, and not terribly broad in most places. To think that an inch-and-a-half long stretch of rigid metal could mistakenly end up squarely in the middle of one, much less run luge-like all the way to your ticker, I quickly realized was essentially impossible.

Still, to this day, and despite the protestations of my rational mind, I run a short length of thread through any needle in my possession. Just in case.

My interest piqued by Greg’s discovery of the Anologia Star Estimator, I decided to give the system a whirl. In short, pop in a picture of yourself, and the Estimator suggests three celebrities you supposedly resemble.

Testing the system out with three different self-portraits, I ended up with a slew of possibilities, though with two suggestions popping up twice: Johnny Depp and George Clooney. And, flattering as that may be, I’m left rather seriously doubting the system, as I’m pretty sure I look absolutely nothing at all like either of those two guys.

Instead, in real life, I get stopped on the street by people who feel the need to tell me I look like Matthew Broderick. The beard and short haircut was, in part, an effort to stop that, which seems to have worked, though now I occasionally get Edgar Bronfman, Jr.

Still, by self-assessment, especially on those days when skipping showering forces the front of my hair into a kewpie-doll point, I’ve determined I most closely bear a resemblance to: TinTin.

I am a wild sleeper. When I was a kid, I’d occasionally go to sleep normally, yet wake with my head down at the foot of the bed, my feet at the top. While I owned a down comforter, I took to using it without a duvet cover, as I’d toss and turn enough in my sleep to twist the comforter down into a small ball somewhere in the cover’s depths.

As I’ve aged, my sleeping habits have smoothed over somewhat. I no longer wake up on the wrong end of the bed, my blankets make it largely intact through the night. But I still tend to toss and turn, to shift positions constantly. It only becomes a real problem when I share a bed, at which point I wake myself up by unintentionally waking up the person next to me. Though it tends to improve over time, I suspect it’s largely due to a bedmate getting used to my frenzied sleep habits, to the point where she sleeps straight through them.

Still, I suppose that nonstop-motion approach to sleep shouldn’t come as much of a shock, given I tend to do the same thing during my waking hours. Apparently, that’s just the sort of person I am.

Recently, I’ve been thinking about the personalities that people project through their blogs, about how, when meeting bloggers in real life, I invariably either think “this person is exactly like their website,” or “this person isn’t anything like their website,” though rarely anything in between. And, in the case of that second group, those bloggers whose real and digital selves diverge, I wonder how intentional that difference is. Are they recreating online who they secretly wish they could be in real life? Or are they simply unaware that their web-message and their in-flesh medium somehow don’t line up?

In my own case, I’m fairly sure the real me and the digital me are, for better or for worse, rather similar. By and large, I suspect any readers meeting me in real life for the first time are likely to leave the encounter thinking, ‘yep, that’s pretty much what I expected.’ The only exception, however, might be the same lament often whispered behind the backs of famed actors seen for the first time in person: “he seems much shorter in real life.”

Which is to say, at 5’6″, I’m certainly not tall. For years, in fact, I’ve joked that I should change this site’s tagline to: “the dangerous result of a serious Napoleon Complex run for decades unchecked.” But, in truth, I don’t think of height as a big issue, nor have I for most of my life.

Certainly, through most of elementary school, I didn’t give it too much thought; though small, I was still extremely fast, and therefore an asset on dodgeball and kickball teams, as well as uncatchable enough to survive even the roughest games of ‘kill the pill’ – the consummate test of schoolyard masculinity. It wasn’t until I hit middle school, as the girls began to sprout up faster than us guys, that I even began to notice my own small size. Even then, I quickly discovered upsides – at middle school dances, for example, I was invariably boob-level on the taller girls I asked to slow dance. (“Put on End of the Road again! Put on End of the Road again!)

By high school, as we guys caught back up, however, I started worrying – in typical insecure ninth grader style – that girls might not be interested in me because of my height. So, in a solution that, in retrospect, was both extremely inane and admirably ballsy, I set about trying to prove otherwise to myself by hooking up with the tallest girls that I could. I don’t mean to sound as though I was obsessed with the idea – most of the girls I dated in high school were of average height – but, given the chance, I’d try and steal kisses from any cute, tall, lanky girl I could find.

As a result, after my Freshman year of college, I ended up making out with a UCLA volleyball player at a barbecue on a beach in Half Moon Bay. She was 6’2″. I declared victory, gave up on the tall girl search, and went back to not thinking much about height – mine or that of the girls I was interested in.

Though, to be fair, if someone were to call Everything I Do (I Do It For You) up on a bar jukebox, I’m not sure I could resist reverting, full circle, to my middle school self breast-level eyeline self, searching out the tallest girl in the bar, and asking her to dance. Old habits die hard.

For the past week, I’ve been utterly and completely overwhelmed by life. Between Bobby’s wedding, a cousin’s bat mitzvah, my parents and brother being in town for both events, and the extended process of wrangling tax returns for all of Paradigm Blue’s sub-companies, I’ve simply had no time to do the many, many other things I had hoped to fit into the week. I’ve been dropping balls left and right, constantly trying to clean the mess of those balls dropped, and overall nearing the point of admitting defeat and curling in corner in the fetal position, rocking quietly.

Now, however, having given up sleeping and going to the bathroom to free up time, I’ve finally begun to catch back up rather than fall continually farther and farther behind. The insanity, it seems, has peaked, and I’m finally gaining momentum on the long downhill slope back to the merely painful (as opposed to the current, suicidal) level of overcommitment that defines my life.