But the cosmos didn't want ordinary for me. It had some sort of agenda. It needed the "special ones," a term that had me gagging every time my esteemed mother spouted it to me over the phone when I called her once a month. My five brothers liked it, and my three sisters thrived on it. Hell, they had built a reputation in their cities on the special thread of DNA that ran through our family. Me, I just wanted to be invisible.

Each morning I rose and showered for all of a minute and a half. It was all I could stand. The human body needed water for too many reasons, the most important being to ward off funk that if allowed to linger would ward off other people. Being a dragon--you know, the fire-breathing kind--made water a bit of a challenge. Even in my human form, the steam would rise when the water pelted my flesh, as if I was putting out a fire. I think it had something to do with the fact that I was hotter after a night's sleep. You don't want to know what the natural state of my surroundings became before I had obtained specially-made, fire retardant furnishings. It wasn't pretty ... or repairable.

All of these issues with being a dragon were inconvenient to say the least. I liked being human. I liked wearing a tie. I liked donning a suit fresh from the cleaners. The crisp edges and the scent of dry-cleaning were two of my delights in the simple life I lived. While I didn't want to perpetuate the myth that nerds were number crunchers, always wore suits and were forced to sport style-less glasses, I did fit the profile. I did have to wear the glasses, but not because I was hopelessly myopic, but because I had yet to master the intense vision of the dragon. Here I was one hundred and thirty years of age, and I still couldn't help seeing the hairs on a bug's legs at fifty yards away. It was distracting. The glasses helped to tone it down.

My regular schedule, as I began to outline, was to rise early, shower and dress, then ride my bike down to Cassie's bakery, about ten blocks from my apartment. Now, Cassie's city-wide famous bagels were not what brought me down there each morning without fail. It was Cassie's legs that were my undoing. Those long, shapely, objects of perfection, pulled me in every time. But staring at her was another little life lesson the cosmos taught me about the hard way.