Who needs a career counselor when you can just shave your legs?

Hello, awesome readers!

Do you remember what you wanted to be when you grew up?

I do. Apart from being a writer, there was a time in my life when I wanted to be – of all things – a veterinarian.

I was about five years old and had already made a name for myself in that if there were feral critters in a box under a bed somewhere, 11 times out of 10 they were under MY bed. (Did you know that baby hawks are full of flees?)

But then something pretty traumatizing happened that changed the course of my future. I was in the bath with my mother and after carefully watching her shave her legs with what turned out to be the grim reaper’s scythe disguised as a woman’s razor, I decided to shave my own hairless legs. After all, I had a lot of work ahead of me as a vet and if I could just get this one little task out of the way, I’d be that much further ahead. (The clever planning of a five year old.)

That’s when I heard it: the scream that shook me out of my blissful state of focused leg shaving.

The shriek, made even louder as it resonated off the pale, blue bath tiles, had actually come from me at about the same time that I realized I was sitting in a tub full of my own blood.

I learned two important things that day:

One, that my mother did not actually leave the razor in the dish for me to use next.

And two, there’s no way I could ever be a vet. Animals are FULL of blood.