Wednesday, August 01, 2007
Having read every chapter covered, in its entirety, and neglecting to so much as glance at the lecture slides my professor provided on his website, I scored a ninety-seven on the first American public policy exam I took a couple of weeks ago. For the exam I took today, I studied the slides exclusively and ignored the book. I felt confident about most of the answers- surely I made a "B" or better. The questions were mostly intuitive.
This evening I walked a friend of mine from the coffee shop to the campus library (I wanted to be there to protect him, in the event of attack by a serial murderer-rapist). At one point in our conversation, he turned to me and said,
'Lauree, if I could take on just one percent of your misery, I would have a life-time supply.'This is veritable. He fabricates all of his angst, but mine comes from legitimate foundations. I trace everything that goes awry to having stemmed from something my father did.
Exemplum: About two weeks ago, I wiped out on my bike, bruising most of the right side of my body. The emergency room bill incurred afterward comes to slightly under four thousand dollars. The bruises to my hip and a rib or two still prevent me from walking or breathing properly. If I do not heal very soon, my doctor has threatened to put me on physical therapy.
This is all my father's fault.
Logic: When he was eight, my father taught himself how to ride a unicycle. He kept (and presumably still has) that unicycle, and used to take it out to ride on occasion, as one of his impressive, though mostly useless, miscellaneous talents. In high school, my sister's boyfriend captured the spectacle on home video. He also kept and rode sporadically a yellow racer-bike from college. My senior year of high school, we went to Academy and picked out a bike (as a birthday expenditure) for me to ride around during college, since I was probably not going to afford a car anytime soon. A week later, he went back to Academy and purchased the man-version of my bike for himself.
Since then, I have always had a bike. The one I brought from home ran away, presumably, though I found out (too late) that I had left it on campus, whence it was very likely impounded. Several months later, a friend kindly gave me his bike, which I had grown accustomed to having as a main source of transportation over this past year. Without it I felt impotent, and over-compensated by investing in a fancier, more efficient bicycle, with some half-baked notion of slowly training over the coming academic year to enter in marathons... or something. At present, that bike is parked, gleaming and undamaged, next to my dorm, mocking me as I hobble by on my way to class every morning. I haven't decided yet, whether I am to trade it in for a more user-friendly (or at least, "Lauree-friendly") model.
None of this would have happened, if at the age of eight my father hadn't been fascinated enough by a unicycle to teach himself how to ride it. His determination assured my misery.
[Lauree Frances Keith concluded this diatribe at 7:40 PM]