Hadda a girl once, this was during college.
Darkest, longest hair, biggest brownest eyes …
Not that kind of story, whatever kind you thought.
Being stupid (I said this was during college, yes?) I’d no idea … none. Not what it was nor what it cd be and thus not that one though it set me off on the one I have which for better or worse is mine. So, mentioned here just for this: we used’ta have this exchange wherein my journeying to university had come lacking nearly withal the blessing of the state, by completing a sanctioned diploma program in high school. Took the equivalency exam, which a moderately accomplished monkey in the 8th grade could’ve passed — seemed like ‘you might need it’ applied here — but I didn’t, and don’t, have a high school diploma.
Whenever I said that to Rachelle she nearly always rightly mocked me in a gruff approximation of a voice we s’posed to might’ve belonged to an ignorant caveman:
‘heh, heh … snort … I dudn’t grade-jyoo-eight.’
The truth of it was that I didn’t graduate … but I did finish. Prolly coulda done so as an eighth grade simian save for the five-paragraph essay they required to get out of the ninth. I cd’ve written it, sure, but for the blinkered Philistines running the show who wouldn’a have administered it.
And of course the point of the truth is that it didn’t matter.
It didn’t matter I snort … dudn’t grade-jyoo-eight … because there I was at USC and, more broadly, no one would care.
One at about that time did — another girl sorta hadda, had in high school said she broke up with me because I hadn’t ‘had my senior year experience’ so she at the time cared, but that’s it.
No one since ever has.
This is a lawngish way of saying, but mayhap not an unenjoyable way of hearing, that sometimes I’ve been known to do a thing different. This is not me tryin’a sound so cool (a detestable thing; read late, semi-sainted journalist and Roman Catholic Michael Kelly’s essay, ‘King of Cool’ — you can find it by Googling his name with ‘Do not blame it on the bossa nova’ or just click here).
A place presently fitful for this anti-socialization behavior is graduate school — or as Rachelle might mock, grade-jyoo-eight skool.
My APA papers are APA papers but do not sound like APA papers.
This causes a response very exactly like, ‘This is not an APA paper.’
Imagine a shopping list that rhymes.
A room piled with papers, plied with books, not the 60-inch TV expected.
A black bear with a mountainous interstate highway-shaped streak of charcoal gray down his spine.
Are they still a list, a room, a bear?
Not what we thought such things hadda be.
If we care a’tall on’t we may end up caring more.
If we don’t, that’s not a person I’m writing to for with.
Not even with for to grade-jyoo-eight.
None too cool it ain’t.
Which is OK.