May 12, 2001

This is a very sad day.

I woke up this morning and got ready to see the press screening of Shrek with my friend Abbie. I was completely unaware that something singular had happened in the world—in my world—the day before and a strange nostalgia fogged my head. For the first time in nearly sixteen years, I put on a very special shirt: a baseball jersey with cobalt blue sleeves. On the front of the white, see-through part of the jersey, it says, “Don’t Panic”; on the back it reads, “Re-elect Zaphod Beeblebrox.” My mother made that shirt for my fifteenth birthday. I wore it this morning because I suddenly felt like it for no apparent reason.

I was (and still am) a huge Douglas Adams fan. I loved everything the man said and wrote. He single-handedly shaped my sense of humor, made me an Anglophile, and crowned me Queen of Geekdom at my junior high and high school. At band camp, my friends and I even wore towels slung over our shoulders and asked others, “Do you know where your towel is?” We would squint at the other band geeks, saying, “But there aren’t any real people here at all!” We were hopeless nerds. Yet, we were unique.

I couldn’t wait to get a picture of Douglas Adams. I had the biggest, most awful crush on him. Once I did get his picture, I was very disappointed. My mother found me frowning over it in the  …