Like most people currently attending this college, I knew a fair amount about quite a few things when I was in high school. I could tell you who the twenty-eighth president of the United States was or ramble coherently about central place theory. I was able to integrate things. If someone handed me DNA helicase, I would have known what to do with it. I even knew what the word “reticent” meant. Now I’m not so sure. This doesn’t keep me from using it in sentences. “Have you tried the butternut squash soup?” I ask my friends. “I hear it’s really reticent today.”

Recently, during a study at the business school, someone posed me a relatively simple question about the number of elves required to make X widgets in four hours if one elf could make Z widgets in two hours. I was instantly bewildered. “I think this is a real commentary on elf working conditions,” I wrote next to the question, before bursting into tears and muttering something about post-feminism.

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Personal sins shouldn’t require press releases? Problems within a family shouldn’t have to mean public confessions?

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Every so often, when I am feeling plucky, I try to write a screenplay that combines all 10 of Americans’ top phobias and market it as a sleeper hit. The protagonist, an evil dentist (fear of dentists) lives in a tall building (acrophobia) with elevators (agoraphobia) that sometimes, for no reason, are full of spiders, snakes, and dogs (fear of spiders, snakes, and dogs). It is a dark (dark) and stormy (storms) night, and he has to get on an airplane (fear of airplanes). The horrifying twist at the end of the film is that a randomly selected audience member has to stand up and give a speech about it to the rest of the theater. It would become a horror classic. According to The Boston Globe, more people are frightened of public speaking than of drowning. I imagine that, rather than shouting things like “Help!” and “I’m drowning,” the especially timid prefer to quietly drown so as to avoid a fuss.

Statistically speaking, only about 19.2 million Americans have crippling fears of things, and our fears tend to be illogical—airplanes (1 out of 20,000 fatality rate) rather than cars (1 in 100); dentists rather than the apparently friendly people who tend to abduct our children.

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Today is Oscar Wilde’s birthday. He would be 155 years old, and he would not be enjoying it very much. “Youth is the only thing worth having,” he would mutter quietly into his cake. But he’d appreciate the attention.

And he would deserve it. (Nowadays, in the midst of bans on sexiling and Nobel Peace Prize furors, it’s easy to forget the truly important things, like calling your parents or stopping to wish happy birthday to the “first modern man.”) Wilde is an invaluable acquaintance. Often, in situations where I am required to appear witty, I simply steal large chunks from his works and attempt to pass them off as my own with minor modifications. I’m not the first to do this—Dorothy Parker noted, “If, with the literate, I am/Impelled to try an epigram/I never seek to take the credit/We all assume that Oscar said it.” But I know he would approve. When a woman told him that a passage from one of his plays reminded her of a drama she had read before, he nodded. “Taken bodily from it,” he admitted. “Why not? No one reads anymore.”

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Nobody reads anymore. It’s not that we’re illiterate. We’re just un-booked.

Someone in the business recently estimated that there are only 80,000 reliable buyers of serious fiction left in North America. And that was before we lost Michael Jackson. Every year, someone comes out with a study explaining that boys don’t read because, in books, the proportion of car chases to women talking about their feelings tends to be somewhat tilted in favor of the latter. But what’s the excuse for us women?

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