march 26, 2001. My first day of school is behind me. It's a strange mix this time: last semester I was with 3 classes, each with over 32 students. This semester I have a class of 32, a class of 25 and a class of 15. It sounds strange, but I miss the bustle. I miss the way those classes teamed with life, even when the life in question was just bitchy senior girls and their endless paper cups of Tim Hortons coffee. I managed to finish my last assignment in the morning spare, which freed me up for a scintillating afternoon of yawning and counting down the remaining minutes. Last night I was up until midnight finishing the first part of this last assignment, and I woke up at 5:30 this morning. You know: full of energy & nervousness, that sort of thing. As the day went on, I began to droop. By the afternoon my vision had begun to shimmer, like I was caught in a heat wave or suddenly plunged underwater. Very neat visuals. I swear to god, if sleep dep had euphoria attached to it, the ecstasy trade would die out in an hour. Everything that I expected to happen didn't, in fact, happen. I wasn't terribly nervous in the back of the class, even though I once again have 72 names to memorize. (Actually, 71 - one of the kids from last semester's 11 class is repeating the course. This is his 4th time through, and I have to admire his stubborn determination. It's hard enough for me to sit through the same lesson twice in one day, let alone 4 times in 2 years.) A bunch of kids I knew nodded or waved or made the briefest of small talk, which cheered me. I saw the boy who gave me one of his songs, although he didn't see me. I always regretted not talking to him on the last day, and I hope to speak to him this time. But this is a meeting that will wait, I know. After all, it waited this long. Best comment of the day was after my introduction to a grade 11 class: "Wuh, I thought she was a student!" I knew I should've worn my adult hat. I disembarked from the good ship Student Teacher (that is, the carpool car) at the Education building so that I could print out my last few pages. Already the halls are full of an eerie stillness, as if they knew that we're nearly all gone for the next 5 months. Creep-o. The only problem I had then was the walk up the hill - by now the route home is insufferably boring, and tonight the extra poundage of laptop and textbook strapped to my back mixed painful with boring in liberal quantities. To add insult to injury, the lawns are in a state of squishy thaw that tempts me to cut right across their surfaces. I know that I'll just end up with a cuff-full of mud & snow, but I still want to walk the shortest route after so many months of the high snowbanks keeping me to the path. My only consolation was that I had made an enormous pan of lasagna yesterday, thus taking all the guesswork out of my evening routine: Change out of school clothes, crack a diet cola, heat up cold Italian comfort food, turn on Simpsons, park ass on sofa. Remain until done doing nothing. This is, of course, a goal that ever recedes from the grasp... Amy's last entry about her first pregnancy craving is Christing hilarious. If she doesn't win this quarter's humour award, I will lose the infinitesimal amount of faith I have in that whole rotten system. "Forget it! I'll never win an Emmy! Stupid judges...bunch of wizened old cranks, wouldn't know talent if it hit them in the...Hey Hey!" - krusty the klown, paraphrased for your pleasure I've been re-reading Making History, Stephen Fry's last novel. It's not quite as brilliant as I remember it, but I did come across one passage that left me gasping for air: I had behaved like a spoilt child because I was scared at the prospect of my passage out of studenthood and into the land of grown-ups. That was cool. It was no more than a natural little tantrum. Like I said about doors, about hovering on thresholds. Saying farewell to the long, happy process of being a good, clever little boy who writes essays and earns praise and writes more essays and earns more praise, At seven I was smarter than most ten-year-olds, at fourteen smarter than a seventeen-year-old, at seventeen smarter than a twenty-year-old. Twenty-four now, I was no smarter than any other twenty-four-year-old around the place and anyway, it was no longer a race and there were no more prizes for being a prodigy. Everyone had caught up with me and I knew, I understood with a sharp gutstab of horror, that the danger now was that I would stand still while they raced past.