My hair. Specifically, allowing my real hair color to reappear after more than ten years of being hidden behind a chemical mask. Anne Kreamer has written a book called Going Gray: What I Learned about Beauty, Sex, Work, Motherhood, Authenticity, and Everything Else That Really Matters in which she chronicles the 18 months it took for her to go from having hair that was, as she describes it, “dyed inappropriately dark”, to her natural shades of gray. Long before her book was published I’d been contemplating this. It’s not the end result that frightens me – I’m not concerned about looking older (or old) – but rather it’s the process of getting from here to there. A wormhole would be ideal – just fold up the space/time continuum in so that I could avoid all that in-betweenness of letting my highlights grow out, of having roots of intermingled gray and brown, of feeling awkward and getting to the point of saying “Enough!” and running whimpering back to the salon. Perhaps, like a diet, the new year would be a better time to start this adventure. Maybe by then the need to shed the monthly chains to a hair colorist will overshadow the inevitable ugly-hair period.

Fred Thompson. When Reagan was running for his first term, my aunt expressed outrage that he would ruin the country and that she would want to move abroad if he was elected. (Although she did not actually move to Canada, her opinions were prescient.) At the time I was just out of college and immersed in my job, applications for grad school, and getting rid of the roaches in my apartment. The presidency seemed remote, with not even the barest sliver of a connection to my life. Now, faced with a candidate who embodies many of those same values, who apparently would invest the executive branch with even more imperial traits than Reagan, Bush I and Bush II have done, who would want to control my life and impose his own warped sense of moral rectitude on the country as a whole, I am frightened that there is even the slightest possibility that he would become president. I understand my aunt’s voice quaking with rage – and fear – as she talked about Reagan.

The many Americans who believe that General Petraeus did not in any way share, vet, or otherwise review his Congressional comments with any branch of the government before delivering them. There is probably a high degree of correlation between this group and the ones who could imagine themselves voting for Fred Thompson.