jacktellslies

My diploma is bound in a red bookish kind of thing in a manner that would make it impossible to display, if I had a reason or a place to display it. It is off to the side on the bottom row of my bookshelf, the shelf for things that I like, but for which I don't really have a place: art books, the small collection of modern fiction that does not annoy me, books that belonged to my father that I've not read yet, a biography of Napoleon's empress Josephine, an out of date but not antique medical textbook, my diploma.

And there is a cock ring on Parker's towel, which is hanging in the shower, and which she'd intended to use in a minute. This is war. We have already put a dildo on Bill's pillow.

By the by, we never made it to the strip club, but we'd like to go tomorrow night. If you'd like to join us, you'd be welcome to stay here for the night if you needed or wanted to do so.

Everyone has this moment, I think. I was six, and I realized that, at the very earliest, I'd be in school for the next two lifetimes. It has been almost a third since then.

I did not graduate from high school. I broke up with it. There were tears, and there was rage. My father was starting to die, so I got mad at the school for leaving me when I needed it, and for not getting it, and for going easy on me then, rather than when I'd needed it more. I suppose I got mad at the school so that I wouldn't be angry at him. I felt the proper self-satisfaction, though. I thought that I was brilliant. I wanted to live in words.

I'm graduating quite soon, and, although I'd not felt it this fully before, because I was still in it, or because this is what people who graduate do, I regret having gone to college. I must admit that I appreciate the books I've read. But my academic writing is terrible. It has gotten me wonderful grades, to be honest, but it is nothing that anyone would, or should, ever want to read. I don't feel particularly intelligent. I don't think that I deserve my grade point average. I've met a few professors whom I adore, but I think, perhaps, that I could have learned more by having had lunch with each of them a few times. And I've spent quite a lot of money on this.

I'm better than I was when I started this. But that has more to do with what I was doing when I wasn't in class, like having weird jobs, and talking to people, and reading, and teaching myself things, and traveling, and trying to make sense of all of this. I could have run away to London and made terrible choices, but I had to go to class, you see. And I earned a piece of paper that I hope I'll never have to use. Well. This is likely only a pang of regret, and not a lasting emotion. (I deny having lasting emotions, anyway.) And there is the future to which I can look. Places to go, real things to learn. But I hate busy-work, and I cannot seem to shake the feeling that I've been doing it for nearly five years. I only finished it because I'd started.

At least I managed to spite Alex. That is something.