Poison for Breakfast

by Lemony Snicket

They ache in the brain and the body, these shameful memories, like a broken bone that has never quite healed right.

I do not like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I do not like paddling a kayak in the hot sun. I do not like Santa Claus. I do not like it when someone takes out a guitar and everyone has to sing. I do not like standing in a cheering crowd, particularly if the crowd is watching people whose job it is to throw a ball throw a ball. I do not like a picture of a man on a horse. I do not like it when everybody is doing the same thing and someone is standing with a stopwatch waiting to give a prize to the person who finishes doing it first. I do not like hot chocolate and I do not like wearing a shirt or a hat with the name of a place written on it so everyone knows you have been to that place, and I am not a fan of raisins, so I am often frowning at the music in the supermarket.

Each patron in a library is looking for something different, and so the book you hardly notice is the book someone else is breathless to find, and the book that always makes you smile is busy making someone else sick.

you told me to describe myself in one word, it would be “not very good at following directions.”