Christy The Writer

My name is Christy Potter Kass. I’m a writer.

I’m 40 years old. I live in New Jersey and I’m from Kansas but I consider San Francisco my natural habitat. I have a great job (public relations), a cat (Harry Potter Kass), an apartment (too small and covered with cat hair) and a patient husband (Guy).

I battle my bosses, my family and the psychotic circus that New Jersey calls traffic. Every day I wish I could just go sit in the yard and make daisy wreaths for my hair, but I figure there’s time enough for that when they finally put me away.

I like gin, dark beer and cheap Rieslings, and I regularly try to convince myself to swap coffee for green tea. I am trying to be a vegetarian, but in truth I love a good steak … although I have been known to eat a mediocre steak if I have enough gin, dark beer and/or cheap Riesling to wash it down.

My hobbies include coloring my hair, wishing David Sedaris was straight, moisturizing, singing 70s music while I’m vacuuming, and planting bulbs for the squirrels to dig up the minute I come back in the house. I like toffee, stale marshmallows and will choose a slapstick British comedy over the news any day. I would die a happy woman if I ever had the chance to spend just five minutes in the same room with Philip Roth.

I have funny friends who like the same board games I do, which is secretly how I choose my friends. I’ve never gone to one of my high school reunions although I probably will now that I can look back at the 80s with nostalgia instead of a faint feeling of annoyance and revulsion. I’m shamelessly addicted to Facebook, and I can apply quotes from The Simpsons and/or The Golden Girls to almost any situation in life. What can I say? It’s a gift.

I love baseball, basketball and soccer and am unapologetic about my crush on David Beckham, although Guy tries to get me to apologize for it about every other day. I am a half-assed runner, which means I bought an expensive pair of New Balance and an arm band for my iPod so I look like I’m serious about it when I haul my carcass down the street at 6 a.m. I also creak, groan and teeter my way through a weekly yoga class and invariably pass out during savasana.

I watch Law and Order but have never found out how one ends because I always fall asleep halfway through it and spend the next morning asking Guy stuff like, “Wait, I thought the suspect was that one chick. Who was she then?”

Five days a week I put on power clothes and drive to my office in a big company. Five days a week I dream of my future self, an enigmatic novelist who writes one interesting, cryptic book that generations of graduate students discuss in dark coffeehouses and some smartass indie filmmaker makes into a short film that runs for three days in TriBeCa but I never see because I live in a ramshackle farmhouse in the Blue Ridge Mountains with my cats and my collection of beer mats.

The other two days of the week I write. I have to start somewhere.