“I guess,” I said with a sigh, as if it were this very big pain in the neck for me.

Except of course it wasn’t. Because when you love something, you want to do it all the time, even if no one is paying you for it.

At least that’s how I felt about drawing.

Until I met Susan Boone.

Top ten reasons I wish I were Gwen Stefani, lead singer of the best ska band of all time, No Doubt:

10.  Gwen can dye her hair whatever color she wants, even bright pink like she did for the Return of Saturn tour, and her parents don’t care, because they appreciate that she is an artist and must do these things as a form of creative expression. Mr. and Mrs. Stefani probably never threatened to cut off Gwen’s allowance the way my parents did that time I tried the thing with the Kool-Aid.

9.  If Gwen chose to wear black every single day, people would just accept it as a sign of her great genius and no one would make ninja comments, like they do about me.

8.  Gwen has her own place, and so her older siblings can’t come busting into her room whenever they want to, poking through her stuff and then telling their parents on her.

7.  Gwen gets to write songs about her ex-boyfriends and sing them in front of everyone. I have never even had a boyfriend, so how could I have an ex to write about?

6.  Free CDs.

5.  If she were getting a C-minus in German on account of using all her class time to write songs, I fully doubt Gwen’s mother would make her take a songwriting workshop twice a week. More likely, she’d let Gwen drop German and write songs full time.

4.  She has dozens of websites dedicated to her. When you put the words Samantha Madison in any search engine, nothing whatsoever about me comes up.

3.  All of the people who were mean to Gwen in high school are probably totally sorry about it now and try to suck up to her. But she can just be like, “Who are you again?” like Kris Parks was about me when I got back from Morocco.