An Ode to the Match Game (or, Where Have All The Game Shows Gone?)

I was not raised like most kids of my generation. According to my mother, I taught myself to read by scanning through newspapers and picking out stories that interested me. There are home movies of me at age 4, inside my bedroom, pointing at posters on my wall of Neil Armstrong and Abe Lincoln, and reciting facts and dates like I was some sort of damned history professor or something. In first grade, Mom and I thought it would be "fun" for me to memorize Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and recite it in front of my classmates. I'm not saying this stuff to tell you how smart I am -- if I were actually as smart as all that, I wouldn't be a 25-year-old Wal-Mart cashier still working on her undergraduate degree. I'm saying this stuff because, looking back, it's a wonder that I have things like friends or social skills.