One of the advantages of being self-employed is that you can sit in front of your laptop obsessively refreshing a Twitter page in hopes of winning free concert tickets without fear of being discovered by your boss. The @IndyStateFair Twitter page has been giving away free tickets to various events this month. You just have to be the first person to direct message them with the correct answer to a trivia question. When I saw that they were going to give away tickets to the Journey concert with opening act Heart, I opened up one browser window for the direct message and another with the Twitter feed to refresh every minute waiting for the question.

I didn’t expect to win because I don’t know any much Journey trivia, but after about 10 minutes I hit refresh and was startled to see the question appear, “Which current reality show judge was a member of Journey from 1986-87?” I haven’t watched American Idol since season two, unless you count the weekend I watched every Adam Lambert video online [...]

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The biography of my early childhood was written in T-shirts touting my accomplishments. The white ringer tee with the calculator on the front was from the time I competed in Mathletes. The pink shirt with the panda bear was from the time I sold over 200 Girl Scout cookies to frat boys. The dark blue Floyd’s Fork Farm long-sleeved tee was from the high school camping trip where half the class got drunk and smoked pot and we got the trip banned for the next four years. My brother had gotten one of those shirts two years earlier and it confused me because I thought forks came from Bed, Bath and Beyond and not from a farm. I was gently informed that it referred to a farm near a fork in Floyd’s river.

When I was scavenging the Goodwill racks earlier this week, I found a shirt from someone else’s biography. It was a brown tee from the French Broad River Rafting Expeditions. I’ve never been rafting, nor did I know where the French Broad River [...]

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