There was definitely no dancing, underage drinking, etc. And the truth is, even if the setting was different, I’m more Rory and Paris than Madeleine and Louise. Pizza and The Power of Myth sounds way better than staying out late dancing and drinking… or whatever it is people do on spring break.
If I were a man of principle, I would have shouted, “GET THIS DEVIL STICK AWAY FROM ME” and thrown it into a tree.
We aren’t who we should be, and that’s not ok. And try as we do, we can’t fix our ugliness. But that doesn’t mean we’re not loved, and it doesn’t mean we’re alone.
If I sound whiny, forgive me. I’m cloistered amongst literal stacks of books with an academically sanctioned excuse just to read. That’s gotta be one of the most bourgy complaints imaginable.
“Say nice things to me,” I pleaded with him once in desperation. “You’re beautiful,” he told me, which had once been enough, back when he was the first to ever tell me, “…and smart?” I felt myself slipping away.
It’s a remnant of an earlier time, back when the High Line was simply an overgrown former elevated rail track and Gansevoort Street was stained red with the blood of slaughtered animals.
Nothing is trendier or, as a teacher, more likely to get your story turned into a Hollywood film about how you helped an inner city kid become this century’s Twain than to be an English Literature teacher.
Keep talking. Eventually, you assume, something will make sense. Pieces and parts of pieces will be put together, and the sense-making that has happened in your head will become public knowledge.
Either the Brothers Grimm had a cunningly nonchalant attitude toward morbidity, or German children simply grew up with stronger stomachs in those days.
But mathematics at its best is a pursuit into the unknown, equipped with a few tools with which you are familiar and a solution that requires an innovative use for them.
