Yay! Look who's going to The Beach tomorrow! except it's not a real beach but melissa's grandpa's pool, but what the hell. i need a tan. time to destroy some of my DNA...but then again that's why we have little proofreaders in there anyway....put em to good use, right?
Harry potter soon!

Heather's grad party was last night....it was a lot of fun. there was coning, and xtreme volleyball, and hot tubs, and make-your-own-sundae, and we went and visited greg's house at midnight so melissa could finally meet him and stroke his chest. i realized that jess stone doesn't hate me like i always thought she did, and that dee is cool! i even had fun with random people like pam, reminiscing about st gabe's days, and nicole, thinking about our bright and glorious future together at fairfield. orientation is thursday! im so excited! i have to be there at 9! dammit!
hilary and julie didnt bother to show up or even tell heather they couldn't come. real nice. i didnt bring heather a gift, oops, but melissa made her this awesome collage that had just about anyone heather has ever associated with on it! it's amazing! i have to make one for my dorm room, man, so people know i have friends. in other news, heather has set each of us on the scent to track her down some dating material before she leaves for disney. one week, my minions!

"ROAD WORK AHEAD". Thus read the 4 BY 4 sign that we stole from the Mecca of traffic goodies tonight. The damn thing was so huge it barely fit in the back of my car, which is saying something. it was immediately used to add to the preexisting decorations on jess stone's car, whcih was sitting at the averys' house.

I got my first real cone tonight! stole it from katie's house on the way home because she didnt appear to plan to use it for coning.

Oh and met sara's new boyfriend tyler. well he wasnt her boyfriend till after we met him, but whatever. he reminds me of a hybridization of pete and aaron....unfortunately like steve of "follow your nose" fame, he cannot drive, and sara's mom is being prickly about letting her use the car. sucks.

im tired as all hell now. i got like four hours sleep because i got in at 2 and then kept thinking about the ending of the Ring and then had to wake up at 730 and never got back to sleep. poo.

the new heather language is now a mix of gangsta and piratical terms, such as "holla back, matey!" and "ar, my homey". lol

went underwear surfing with heather at victoria's secret! SALE! cute new bra! heather got a miracle bra...like the gal needs a miracle for the Grand Tetons? :-)

Yay it worked! i was about to find myself a new home and that would have been a pain in the ass.

last night was fun, even though we didn't win the trivia game. we were pretty close, though, and cmon, who the hell reads danielle steele and goes to hooters? that question was impossible. humorously, we saw mr prezch there from northwest. he goes every wednesday. he said he was glad we'd graduated cause now he can let loose. apparently teachers like doing that; jessi told me mrs oberg threw a party for her theater class and they all got drunk together. and kaplan, we know that story, right? *shakes head* anyway, justin and bill showed up once again, along with this guy jay who turned out to be 22. that's pretty funny when you consider that khara's little bro was also there, and he's thirteen. i don't know why he came, exactly, he didn't look to be having too much fun. khara's mom came too after a while. we went back to khara's house to watch the ring, which was a pretty scary fucking movie and then i had to drive home all by myslef and i kept thinking there was something in the back of my car about to kill me. stupid, i know, but i managed to scare myself shitless. oh and melissa gave me a tutorial on how to have sex in the backseat of a car, me playing the guy unfortunately. heather was seriously pimping herself out last night lol with all three guys. she just needs to make that leap, you know, she's already got all the "moves". however she was very useful in that she kept making it clear that i had a boyfriend, which kept that bill guy away. *shudder* good lord. he wanted to drive me back to khara's and so i quickly latched on to jessi. emily assured me that bill's very nice and would never try anything, but hey, i know that at least if jessi tried something on me, it wouldn't be the first time, right? plus i'm just not stupid. i was not raised to go catch a ride with some kid i've only met twice who is so much stronger than me. he showed off by lifting various people horizontally above his head. i refused, being afraid of heights.

Anyway it was all in good fun....i have fun with those set of people in a different way than with my own little group. i mean, i can't really picture myself getting dorky with them like i do with meghan or ashley or something, or having our group's long "deep" discussions that i've had with various persons. but it's still fun to be outrageous and grab your own boobs at times. it's all good.

Let's try this thing again and see if it works. Stupid upgrades.

Oh my...people who refuse to use proper grammar on computers frustrate me. There's something aesthetically displeasing to me about seeing "How r u?" and "2 good 2 b tru" show up on my screen. it's the demise of the english language, i tell you. forget spanglish, we need to worry about internetish.

Ah, so Blogger has so generously decided to become functional once again. how nice of it.

last night i read a novelette by ayn rand called anthem. it was very very short, sort of on the cusp between short novel and a long short story. anyway, it was set in a distant future where alll sense of personal identity has been abolished, and everyone is allowed to speak only in terms of the great WE. they're not allowed to live for themselves, only for and through the goodwill of all their brothers. it's very futuristic and interesting, and the basic plot is the one guy, Equality 55 75 or some other number (no one has a real name), is different from the others, which is a crime, but he figures out a whole bunch of stuff and escapes and founds a new city where men worship themselves, not each other. and he finds out the sacred word, which will get you killed if you say it aloud-- Ego. Not ego in the selfish megalomaniac kind of way, but its original freudian meaning, the actual self identity of man, which should never be sacrificed to the common good. anyway, i reccomend this short little novel. easy to read and makes you think. best kind. of course, those with strong grammatical backgrounds will wince at the use of prounouns; in describing another person, rand would say "they has red hair" because every person is a "we", and not one individual. it's weird.

possibly going to hooters tonight. i hope we actually make it ther this time!

Well, I had one stress-free day with no mother, sister, or dog. Needless to say, it was one of the best days I've had in months. I came home to a quiet house with some takeout from work, had a leisurely meal, then read for a few hours, then watched a movie until it was time for the agency. this morning i slept until noon with no dog to be let out and no sister to be driven to work. i stayed in a bathrobe until 4 15 when i got ready for work. utter and complete bliss.

and now they're all back.

I got up early today to go the book sale in west hartford....and got the following:
The Godfather : a newer edition than the cracked one i had
The Anthem, by Ayn Rand: i've heard this is a good book
The Screwtape Letters by CS Lewis: I've read these before, they're excellent.
Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters: these poems are just so good. so damn good.
Three little books on art in spain, one on Goya, one on Velasquez, and one on El Escorial, that place we visited up in the mountains with the coffin room.
Descartes' Discourse on the Method: read this last year, got confused by it, thought i'd read it again.
Candide by Voltaire: one of the best satires ever written....i thought my edition was bad, turns out it wasn't, so now i have two in great condition. anyone want one?
a book called the fencing master, it looked pretty good, said it was a times bestseller
Catch 22 by joseph heller: this has been on my "to read" list for a long time, and now it is mine...
Bullfinch's mythology: good reference text. bought this for the same reason i bought bertrand russel's guide to philosophy, just in case i need it.
to dance with kings, by rosalind laker: i love her books. she writes about france during the courts of the great kings...most of my favorite novels are historical fiction. i usually like them with some element of mysticism or magic in them, so they're real and yet not, but this one is actually straight hist fic during the court of the sun king, my very favorite ruler of all...
I also bought a book of Milton, probably for reference, a book called the cat who came for christmas (purchased solely because the back said it would describe the cat's encounters with various personages, including george c. scott and CARY GRANT!), and a book called the emperor of the air, oh and the gulag archipelago part two, by solzhenitsyn, simply because i felt in an odd way that i owed it to the man...i wrote a paper on him this year, about his fight for truth and justice. i really respect what he did, in reconstructing the ghosts of a past everyone else just wanted to forget. millions of people, dead at the hands of a power crazed paranoiac, and so few wanted to confront the reality of it all. it made the holocaust look like a car accident, and yet there is so little public knowledge of the atrocities committed by this man against his own people. all in the name of ideology.

anyway good times with book buying! my mom rolled her eyes at the sight of all of them..and, as i knew she would, launched a speech about why we should not keep my dad's books. sigh.

Woke up this morning to the shocking realization that---I don't miss it at all. hahaha. heather said she dreamt of school last night. i didn't. we'll see everyone again at thanksgiving but until then, au revoir.

so i feel like i'm drowning in the minutae of everyday life here. i think i may very well begin to live at the library. soon i will have a toothbrush and an extra pair of underwear there, and perhaps after that a sleeping bag, a flashlight, and some non-perishable food. the people who work there know me so well i doubt it would surprise them if i simply never left one day. or maybe, having exhausted the resources of windsor, i'll transfer my attentions over to west hartford. i've never felt much affinity for bloomfield. then again, something about west hartford is unappealling. it's unfamiliar, but not in the exciting way. so i might wind up a homeless library liver. maybe i'll just stay here after all?

still, visiting the library today gained me the book i've been wanting to read all year--red rabbit, the latest tom clancy. i'm about 150 pages in, and there's more than 600, so i've a ways to go. but it's interesting, very interesting. no other author could be so informative about the stifling bureaucracy and utter incomprehsibility of communist ideology. although i've noticed that in some small points he'll repeat himself, when he's relating some little piece of background information that you should know. like early in the book he decribes the new nanny for Ryan's kids, the daughter of a south african minister who has to be checked out or "vetted" by CIA and SIS, the british agency. then a hundred pages later, she finally enters the story, and he repeats the same info about her almost word for word. it's strange. i wonder if he had the character filled out in his mind and then forgot that he described her already? who knows.

book sale tomorrow in west hartford. yipee! there's almost nothing i love more than acquiring books, although i am so out of room for them. i even went through and picked out some books that i either didn't like or never read and never will, and donated them to the library, but that only gained me about a foot of space. all the other bookshelves are filled with my dad's technical sciencey books ,and if i make one peep about them my mom will seize the opportunity to junk them. only my insistence has protected them thus far, and i only protect them because, in one of the queer actions that my sister later declared to be prescient knowledge of his own death, my dad asked me a few weeks before he died to keep his all of his manuals and books safe in case anything ever happened to him. it was around this same time that he showed me which key on his keyring unlocked his gun cabinet, another thing that struck me as odd at the time. he said it was if i ever needed to get them for some reason, though if he meant protection, they would have done me little good since they were all unloaded. if there was someone in the house, what are the chances i could have gotten his keys, opened the heavy cabinet, found the right bullets for the right gun and then loaded it in the dark? please, i would have just locked myself in the bathroom. much easier and probably safer.

anyway, off to write emails.

I'm not going to say anything about graduation. I refuse to dwell on what happened, what didn't happen, or what might have been. fuck it. high school's over, and i didn't really want to see most of those people again anyway. It's over. Ok I will say this about graduation--when we went up there, waiting for the ceremony to begin and everyone started crying in anticipation, all i was thinking was "it's about goddamned time."

However, the night before graduation is something I'll dwell on!! i finally realize why heather has so much fun hanging out with khara and jess and melissa. even though we didn't make it to hooters, it was such a total blast. emily ended up bringing a very attractive friend, justin, who in turn called a friend to tel him that he was the only guy with seven girls, so of course this other kid came running. we ended up wandering around khara's neighborhood playing some twister and then truth or dare. and, as in any gathering where there are horny persons of the opposite sex, there was flirting and groping and innuendos out the ying yang. mostly it was jessi and melissa vying over who would get down justin's pants. melissa was nice and eventually gave jessi a dare to kiss him, which is exactly what jessi wanted....poor melissa. then there was the requisite flashing and naked jogging, guys weaing bras and girls touching their boobs. a carload of drunken guys who live near khara tried to pick us all up to play beer pong. im not really sure what that is, but we declined, though khara looked like she wanted to say yes. justin invited us all to his houseboat on friday night, but i'm not really too interested in going...it's main feature is two bedrooms.hmmmm what possible purpose would there be in going to a place with two bedrooms? gee! yeah there was this definite separation between me, lindsey, khara and jess stone, who all have boyfriends, and then everyone else who didnt and was therefore up for grabs. but it was still fun to flirt anyway. apparently the other guy, bill, was attracted to moi, as ferreted out by melissa. i felt kind of bad for him. he wasn't very attractive, and he reminded me of aaron meadows, with the muscles and all. blech. i like my men short and scrawny thank you. speaking of which, we coned greg's car in the dead of night. :-) ah, fun times. i kept trying to give heather interesting dares, like kissing a girl, kissing a guy, groping a guy, but she didn't want to grope anyone and she "pecked" justin and jessi. amazingly enough, even i got some action last night! with not one, but TWO DeLeons! i think it was kind of harder kissing jessi because i've been closer to her. melissa was good, we were joking that we would both pretend the other one was greg and go from there. never kissed anyone with a tongue piercing before, but now that i've kissed two, i can say that they are weird as hell. it's like this random hard thing right in the middle of the other person's tongue, like a tumor. lol melissa was worried after that she was going to get me in trouble with greg, and i assured her that i really don't think he'll mind. hey, i would have no problems if he were off kissing guys. although i'd wanna be there. i tried getting justin and bill to go at it, but apparently they were very close friends and adamantly refused. shucks.that would have been like a perfect evening!

well it's late, i'm exhausted, and i should probably go to bed. i never would have lasted on the cruise anyway. what i want more than anything right now is to talk to greg, but he's not going to come online if he hasn't already by now

I've decided not to wait. Goodnight, world.

Tired....so tired...and wondering whether I should try to keep my eyes open in case greg steals online later. I did that last night, watching Bringing Up Baby with Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn, which is a very good movie, but he didn't come online. I could watch another movie, I have The Bishop's Wife (also a Cary Grant one) and Amadeus, because Rae has been extolling its virtues, but I have graduation practice tomorrow, and possibly a haircut as well. Yet I'm lonely, because I miss having a boyfriend that I'm actually allowed to talk to and hang out with.

Will it ever stop raining? Now rain is predicted for my graduation. Maybe we will ride to the cathedral in an ark, and choirs of nightingales will attend the ceremony, piping quietly from the balcony in the back. But there will be no room for the elephants and tigers, with all the relatives crammed in. They will simply have to listen from the street, and huddle under umbrellas as best they can.

Today a group of women came into Sofia's for a gathering. there were thirty of them, all in red hats and purple clothes. thirty old women in scarlet hats and purple clothes. they were members of the society of the red hat, which is an social group for old ladies to get together and gossip and be bawdy. it's based on this poem by jenny joseph:

When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple

with a red hat that doesn't go, and doesn't suit me.

And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves

and satin candles, and say we've no money for butter.

I shall sit down on the pavement when I am tired

and gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells

and run my stick along the public railings

and make up for the sobriety of my youth.

I shall go out in my slippers in the rain

and pick the flowers in other people's gardens

and learn to spit.



You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat

and eat three pounds of sausages at a go

or only bread and pickles for a week

and hoard pens and pencils and beer nuts and things in boxes.



But now we must have clothes that keep us dry

and pay our rent and not swear in the street

and set a good example for the children.

We must have friends to dinner and read the papers.

But maybe I ought to practice a little now?

So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised

When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple.

heehee. the old ladies were very nice, and some of the hats, i must admit, were fascinating.

i'm buying myself a new toy online, yay...well i will be, once my mom comes home so i can use her credit card. haha i'd tell rae now that i'm getting one before her--and it's a cool sounding one, too--but she's not currently on her screen name. oh well. tomorrow is another day. damn things take two weeks to get here from california. i want to play NOW!

Today was our senior outing at High Meadow in granby. it was ok, although there wasn't really a whole lot to do besides wander around or sit in the sun. We got our yearbooks, which turned out really well. unfortunately, there's not a single picture of me in the entire thing besides my awful senior photo, not even in the club pages because i was absent on club day. yipee.

i don't really have anything to do tonight, not that i have any energy to do anything with. i sort of have a much smaller social life now that greg is housebound for god knows how long. i might be going to the diner with sara tomorrow night, i don't know....we were there just last night, though. it was after awards night. i won a bunch, the only ones im really happy about are the plaques for english and biology. i did so well in both those subjects. oh and i got fifty dollars for working on voices for four years muahaha. my spanish class is getting to watch selena in spanish. mrs barret lied and told us the juniors were going to have to review grammar for a month. bastards.

there were so many hot guys at high meadow today! scott's inscription in my yearbook encouraged me to pick up tons up hot guys at parties in college. i laughed and had to tell him that i wouldnt be picking up anyone...im picked up and spoken for. it's weird but sometimes i wish i could do it over again with greg in a different way, not because it should have been different, but just for that initial thrill of not knowing the other person, not knowing what's going to happen. instead of meeting at sara's house or at the play, meeting him at a park or a concert, with no one to introduce us, and just having to wing it. i think i like things dangerous. it was the whole manuel thing that corrupted me, of course. what higher adventure can there be for a teenager than meeting a guy in another country who doesnt even speak your language and making out with him in his hotel room? (this is the part where i curse myself once again for being a stupid little sophomore who was so worried the teachers would catch her that she ran away far too soon.) when i think back on him i always smile, and then i shake my head in awe at my own daring. didn't know i had it in me, and i almost didnt....maybe i wouldnt have done it if meredith hadn't been around, rubbing off on me like some dark fairie dust. it was because he said i was beautiful, really...i had never believed anyone who said that before that point, and i didn't believe a lot of people who said it after, until greg. i don't know why i believed it. something in his eyes made me realize he meant it, even though hilary had to tell me what he'd said. i still have his address written on a scrap of paper that's jammed behind a picture frame that, amusingly, holds a picture of me and greg at last year's prom. i think i didn't want to put it in my box for fear it would be lost. it's so small. maybe someday i'll go to sevilla. i never saw it, but it's supposed to be a beautiful city. maybe i'll look him up, even though he'll have grown up and moved away by then. i've had dreams where i walk through madrid and meet him again, though we don't realize it at first.....when i wake sometimes i think how ironic it would be if he was actually my soul mate, and we met at so young an age like ships literally passing in the night. when i woke the next morning he was gone. i never even knew if they won the championship, but for manuel's sake, i hope they did.

High school is over, as of today. Had some fun exchanging honks and middle fingers with heather on the way home. me, her and adam engaged in a musical horn ensemble at a stoplight, and the guy stuck in the middle of us was laughing like he'd never seen hyperactive teenagers before. it was slightly sad pulling out of the parking lot with all the teachers waving at us, knowing that i'll never be their students again.

i just finished dissembling my beloved backpack. minus all the patches and safety pins, it looks limp and forlorn, adorning the trash can. it looks so ordinary. for two years i've always been able to spot my backpack, anywhere, because it was so darn colorful. even the safety pins, which were originally put there only to keep my backpack together and not as a fashion statement like everyone thought, were familiar to me. if someone's skirt was falling apart, they always came to me to ask for a pin. it was useful. now everything is out of it, and im slowly collecting a pile of junk that i will no doubt be saving. like the note heather gave me in math class after graham asked her to the prom in music theory. my detention from senora barret. multitudinous notes from meghan, pictures jessi gave me, those lollipop condoms that have been in my backpack for months. i said goodbye to my locker today, too, A113. and a not-so-fond farewell to my hated calculus book. muahahaha.

tomorrow night is the award ceremony, the last one i will ever have to sit through. i wonder what i'm getting this year, aside from the voices award and getting called up for graduating with honors. i'd love to get the ap english award, but we had a lot of good students in our class...cross my fingers. other than that, i can't think of what i've really excelled in. spanish, maybe, but meg bonney is always really good too. i only get A minuses, she gets As. bio, meh, probably not, we were all smart there.....haha no hill awards....math not a chance in hell...oh well. i really don't care. we're done. little pieces of paper are unimportant. yet i have a memory of what must have been freshman or sophomore year and rae being upset because she didn't win as many awards as her parents wanted her to. then i saw her mom and she looked all annoyed. weird memory.

High school is over, as of today. Had some fun exchanging honks and middle fingers with heather on the way home. me, her and adam engaged in a musical horn ensemble at a stoplight, and the guy stuck in the middle of us was laughing like he'd never seen hyperactive teenagers before. it was slightly sad pulling out of the parking lot with all the teachers waving at us, knowing that i'll never be their students again.

i just finished dissembling my beloved backpack. minus all the patches and safety pins, it looks limp and forlorn, adorning the trash can. it looks so ordinary. for two years i've always been able to spot my backpack, anywhere, because it was so darn colorful. even the safety pins, which were originally put there only to keep my backpack together and not as a fashion statement like everyone thought, were familiar to me. if someone's skirt was falling apart, they always came to me to ask for a pin. it was useful. now everything is out of it, and im slowly collecting a pile of junk that i will no doubt be saving. like the note heather gave me in math class after graham asked her to the prom in music theory. my detention from senora barret. multitudinous notes from meghan, pictures jessi gave me, those lollipop condoms that have been in my backpack for months. i said goodbye to my locker today, too, A113. and a not-so-fond farewell to my hated calculus book. muahahaha.

tomorrow night is the award ceremony, the last one i will ever have to sit through. i wonder what i'm getting this year, aside from the voices award and getting called up for graduating with honors. i'd love to get the ap english award, but we had a lot of good students in our class...cross my fingers. other than that, i can't think of what i've really excelled in. spanish, maybe, but meg bonney is always really good too. i only get A minuses, she gets As. bio, meh, probably not, we were all smart there.....haha no hill awards....math not a chance in hell...oh well. i really don't care. we're done. little pieces of paper are unimportant. yet i have a memory of what must have been freshman or sophomore year and rae being upset because she didn't win as many awards as her parents wanted her to. then i saw her mom and she looked all annoyed. weird memory.

I've read three books in the past few days: Michael Crichton's Airframe, Five Quarters of the Orange by Joanne Harris, and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. they were all very different books. airframe was very technical, very well-researched, and engrossing. harris' book was very intriguing, but more in terms of character development, or should i say character revelation, as most of the tale is told in flashback. the hitchhiker's guide was amusing in the sardonic way it treats lifeand the Big Questions of the universe. I also got the sequel, the restaurant at the end of the universe, which i plan to read tomorrow since i only have two periods of school before i'm done with high school. oooh and a new book of billy collins' poetry. well not entirely new, it's "selected and new poems" which means it has my favorites from all his books in there! i wants it, i wants it! except that it's twenty two dollars for a pretty slim volume. i'm notoriously cheap when it comes to buying books. i consider them a good buy only if they're inexpensive. i consider paying more than twenty dollars for a book outright fleecing, and only for harry potter will i stomach it. the thought of paying a lot of money for a book that i don't know that i'll like or will have a satisfactory ending, one which i may never read again, is not to my liking. i buy books that i already know i love and would like to have permanently in my possession, like harry potter, howl's moving castle, the oracle glass, the master of all desires, the last don.

but i love billy collins, i truly do....he is my number one favorite poet. i used to love ee cummings, and before that ae housman, and then tennyson, and i still like them, but collins' poetry uses the most mundane images in the most extraordinary ways it just hits me like nothing else i have ever read. oh well--i'll put it on the List of Things to Tell People to Buy Me When Gift-Giving Occasions Occur and I Am Out of Ideas. i dont have one of those, but now i do!

So here I am, trying to pick out classes for next year and really wishing that I could call greg up and ask his opinion on everything, but I can't because his father is a royal dick. I read his xanga today and it made me sad, not because of what it said but because of the feelings behind it. I'm sorry that he has to go through all this, that he has to be made a prisoner in his own house. That's just not right. I don't agree at all with the way his dad treats him. if greg hates school, i'll bet a lot of it is thanks to mr paul and his crazy ideas. I know greg is intelligent, and he can do well if he wants to. He just needs to find out what he wants to be doing, on his own time, and not at the behest of hitler.

when i think about greg and his father, sometimes i think of my dad and what he would have said about all of this. he probably would have agreed with mr paul and grounded him for those grades. not even the programming classes; if he brought home that C in math, all hell would have broken loose. heehee. greg got a better grade than i will in math! if dad knew what im getting in calculus i bet he'd have a heart attack and die all over again. we can't all be math geniuses, dad. sorry. i get the sense that my dad would have done much the same as greg's if i were to be in his position. of course, my dad's version of childrearing was such that that wouldn't happen. he'd never let it get that far, and as his daughter now i would never let it get that far. i think if i failed something, i would be haunted by the thought of his disappointment in me. i think after the fiasco of my dad's first year in college, failing was never an option for him. which made the rest of his life so much harder, never being able to accept that he couldn't go as high as he wanted to. i have long resolved not to let my limitations eat me alive. all the money in the world will never make up for the joy of being loved. i hope my dad never lost sight of that, but i sense that he was embittered by the struggles in his professional life. he was never a failure in any sense, and i hate the thought that perhaps he died thinking that he was. not true. just not true. i loved him, and i love greg, no matter what happens or what he chooses.

perhaps the beginning of my dad's college career is portentous. he was a brilliant student in high school, but he ended up partying his first year at Lowell and failed right out. my grandpa made him spend all summer painting houses. when he went back, he was on the dean's list until graduation. my dad only told me this once, and i honestly could not believe that my straight arrow father, who railed at my sister for getting bad grades in math and for not being an all A student, flunked out of college. i laughed. it was incredulous. he hated it if i referred to it casually, especially in public. i think it must have shamed him, that memory of his initial failure. i asked once if this meant that i would have one year to screw around with in college, and he just glowered at me. guess that was a no.

Rae told me a quote she might use in her valedictory address, i forgot the person: "If you want to be happy, be."