In high school she was a run-of-the-mill disaffected youth with blue hair, but her penchant for Hayley Mills movies fueled her with enough optimism to propel her to UC Berkeley where she earned two Bachelor’s degrees, in Art and English Literature. A callous on her finger from too much late-night journal scribbling ruined her chances of a lucrative career as a hand model, so she fell into a series of wage slave jobs, including one as a museum bookstore clerk and another as a preschool teacher. She soon became aware that her potty mouth and fear of germs made her ill-suited to the needs of the under-6 community, so she became the office manager and de-facto ringleader of the social super-clique at Mother Jones magazine. For five years she supervised practical jokes and post-college hijinx, sharpening her writing skills in both lengthy and pithy emails that alternately praised coworkers or cut them to the bone.