I'm a High School Lover, And You're My Favorite Flavor

You've done endless reading on the subject and participated in hundreds of simulations, but you will still find yourself unprepared for actual sex.

According to The Onion, that is; I'm laughing my ass off right now.

I've been on the phone with a lot of friends lately talking aobut all the excitement I feel regarding graduate school in the fall. There are still so many people who don't know what my plans are, and that I should tell, but I feel that with every re-telling it makes me a little more excited.

This is not good.

Five months before the commencement of an event is not the time to set said event in concrete - unless it's a wedding engagement, but even then anything can happen.

I'm scared that because I've told the story with such confidence that now it's going to be ripped out from under me just on principle. Like when I go out with a guy that dazzles me and puts the butterflies in my tummy, and then as soon as I tell my mom something unforseen deflates the scenario and the next time we talk I'm like,

"oh, yeah... No. But it's cool."

Now, granted, a letter of acceptance from a university is a little more definite than,

"I'll talk to you soon," from a street-corner.

But my desire for this to happen is so much stronger than my desire for a third date that IF this falls through it will be devastating to me. No new lipstick and a night on the town will smooth this over.

I'm recalled to a day when I stood in my room on the third floor of the dormitory as a freshman in 1996. Mama and I had just lugged all my stuff up the stairs, and once settled I called dad to ask him for his address so I could direct my school bill to him. I didn't know it because he had left my mom two days earlier, and I had left on the same day for college; in fact, he scheduled his departure at the same moment as mine.

"Need help carrying those boxes, Katie-Bird?" he asked with his arms full of his stuff.

"I got it," I told him, but of course I wanted his help, or at least his attention: I was leaving home.

He told me over the phone that he hadn't expected to have to pay for my college; didn't I get a full scholarship? He wouldn't do it.

"Why don't you just turn around and come to community college where you don't have to pay for anything?"

The conversation ended in me sobbing that this is the only thing I'd ever wanted, and I had never asked him for anything along the way, and that if he couldn't find $1,000 for my room and board, I didn't need his help, and I'd make it without him.

As we can see, I did just that.

For some reason I had believed that my father was responsible for my well-being, and not only that, but also concerned for it. This was before I fully learned the lesson from a few months earlier when I had become aware a separation was inevitable, and I was sitting in a blues cafe listening to a cover of Creedence's "Have You Ever Seen the Rain." ...it's been coming for some time; when it's over, so they say, it'll rain on a sunny day... And with that I began to understand that even when the sun is out you cannot expect it not to rain. Supposing sun is good and rain is bad.

Eight years after hearing that song played (almost exactly, becuase it was St. Patrick's Day) I think I maybe have learned that lesson. It's not in the bag until it's fucking in the goddam bag.

I really really want this so badly!

On an optimistic note, though, I filled out an application for a teachers assistantship yesterday and I really feel good about the essay I wrote. I got this little burst of inspiration while cooking dinner last night (veal marsala mmmmmmmm) and the finished product really seemed to have an edge.

Like, the kind of edge from when you fold a raffle ticket so it's more likely to stand out against the hand of the draw-er.

In closing, I would like to say that it is fortunate for my sanity that Jeff Buckley is not available for me to fall in love with, becuase I'm certain that if he were I would become utterly obsessed with him like a fifteen-year-old girl in 1963 seeing the Beatles at Shea Stadium. You know, the shrieking and passing out.

Too deaf, dumb, and blind to see the damage I've done...