oh, it tastes like hate!

There's a bus stop shelter that looks like this outside my school, and sometimes I stand under it. Someone wrote "EXPLOSIVES" on the glass with their finger.

This is the last week of school. Part of me is dancing. The rest of me has been sick since Friday night and is getting sicker just thinking about dancing.

On Sunday I went to graduation. I had to. Because someone decided that it was imperative that "Pomp and Circumstance" be performed live instead of playing a recording. So, on my way out the door I crumpled as many tissues into my pocket as I could, and I arrived at school around three for a ceremony that would begin at five.

Twenty minutes into the graduation ceremony, I was draped over my chilly folding chair and rubbing my eyes, regretting that I hadn't brought anything, like a book, or a bottle of NyQuil, or a bowl of Zoloft.

I started thinking. I wondered if I would have enough Kleenex to last me the ceremony. I thought about what I would say if I were to speak at graduation.

I had a speech prepared for tonight, one about this time in high school going by so fast, and good memories, and anticipation for the future. And I had the principal read it and hoped it made her grin like the way a mother grins at her child's poor artwork spawned with construction paper and crayons. Then I threw it away. Because high school is like Saturday morning cartoons, filled with ponies baking cookies and obedient children. When all of you leave high school or college or the caboose of your education, you'll offer your talent to the world, and the world won't care. So I hope all of you fail. I hope you fail before you even make an attempt.

That's when I stopped, because I think by that point, someone would have stopped me, or something.

My Japanese teacher gave all of us a little questionnaire to fill out after we were done taking the final. The last question wanted to know if we had any final "comments/confessions/claims" for her. I circled "confessions" and wrote, "Let's get married."

My list of fans is declining. Once upon a time, that would have saddened me.

On Saturday I read Tuesdays with Morrie. I picked it out of my mom's extensive book collection early that evening. The third page made me smile - "...we are officially graduated from college, the senior class of Brandeis University in the city of Waltham, Massachusetts" - because someone I know attends that school. I finished the book Sunday morning. It isn't even two hundred pages long. But for such a little book, it's brimming with wisdom.

I'm going to Starbucks with my mom now. Then I have to work on my children's book about David Bowie. I researched the 70s for my decades project, and the 70s and David Bowie are wound together like licorice.

Black licorice tastes like hate.