What is it with me today? I am awake, but soft and blurry around the edges, of my vision and of my voice. People keep asking me if I’m sick or what I have been yelling about, and I tell them that it was just a fun weekend spent alternatingly drunk and in the back of a Camaro, but I don’t think that’s really where my voice went.

They haven’t ever heard my voice, my real voice, how I would speak if I dropped the pretense and the humor and spoke from the gut instead of just from the inside of my mouth. I slip it in sometimes, in a conversation about our mailing boards or a redesign, dropping down to my real register halfway through the sentence to see if it makes them flinch.

It doesn’t.