![\"4knvqii1hrby\"](\"https:\/\/itsnotaboutme.tv\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/4knvqii1hrby.jpg\")
<\/a>Most of my family members are writers, especially my mother, whose poems and observations have been featured in numerous publications, most notably the New York Times<\/em>! For the decades she summered in Aspen, she was known as The Poet Laureate of Aspen.<\/p>\nBut I<\/em> loathe writing! Always have. People think I love<\/em> it because I do it every day\u2014first for the other websites I\u2019ve written for, including People.com<\/em>, then for the two newspapers for which I was the restaurant critic, and now, for the past decade!!!, here in my very own e-zine, ItsNotAboutMe.TV. I still can\u2019t believe any of it.<\/p>\n Balloons are always needed for celebrations.<\/p><\/div>\n Here\u2019s a fun little story of why me being what some might consider a successful writer boggles my mind so: When I was registering for classes for my freshman year of college, (we had to do it all in person back in the day,) I wanted Mrs. Ramen as my English professor. But her classes were all full-up, and the person to whom I had to tell my second<\/em> choice was…her husband<\/em>, who was also a freshman English teacher. A dreaded<\/em> one. He was actually my last<\/em> choice, but being the ever-sensitive girl that I was even back then, I didn\u2019t want to hurt his feelings. So when he suggested that I take his<\/em> class, I told him that I had heard that he was a tough marker, and asked, \u201cBut you\u2019re really nice, right? You\u2019ll still give me a good mark, right?\u201d He answered, \u201cAs long as you\u2019re a good writer,\u201d which I assured him I was. (As always throughout my life, my desire to not make a stranger feel bad overrode my common sense.)<\/p>\n So the first paper I had to write for Mr. Ramen\u2019s class was on J.D. Salinger\u2019s Catcher in the Rye<\/em>. I thought my work was pretty good, but when I passed it around to my friends in the cafeteria before class, they were all hysterical laughing. They said it was the funniest paper they had ever read, which was definitely not<\/em> what I was going for. (Then<\/em>\u2014but I\u2019ve since learned where my bread is buttered.) It was sort-of like the first episode of my former TV show, Karen\u2019s Restaurant Revue<\/em>. I had to stop in the middle of the taping to ask the audience to stop \u201cchuckling\u201d because, as I assured them, I was a serious restaurant critic! I had never realized that I\u2019m at my most amusing when I\u2019m being totally serious, something Mr. X is a genius about\u2014he actually insisted<\/em> that I be serious on my show, knowing that people would find it comedically entertaining, which was a surprise\u00a0to me<\/em>.<\/p>\n So I handed in my Catcher in the Rye<\/em> paper, and at the bottom I added, \u201cI was only kidding when I told you I was a good writer,\u201d to which Mr. Rahman wrote back: \u201cYes, I know.\u201d In the paper itself, I had commented that one of the things I really liked about the book is that Holden Caulfield, the narrator, speaks so naturally; the book is written just the way he would talk in real life, were he a real person. And Mr. Rahman wrote, \u201cYou also write like you speak.\u201d But I don\u2019t think he meant it as a compliment.<\/p>\n<\/a>