(no subject)

He yearns for transcendence, but chases after the cheap thrill.



He's not the only one.

Random Childhood Memory

In the seventh grade, a friend and I had a sort of competition to see who would be first to find out the first names of all our teachers. Because certain recalcitrant respondents refused to reveal their given names, I hatched a Clever Scheme to get the information from the school itself. Yes, I wrote letters to the school posing as a newspaper reporter who needed, for purposes of a terribly important story, to find out the full names of a certain group of teachers. Despite my diabolical cleverness, when my father found the rough drafts of my letters, he laughed at me.

Alas, in spite of the extreme cleverness of my scheme, my letters never garnered a single reply. I had to find out the information the old-fashioned way--by pestering people. Fortunately, I was very good at that. Still, I wondered for some time why my Clever Scheme failed so spectacularly. Was it because the reporter happened to share (for perfectly innocent reasons, of course) the mailing address of one of the students? Or was it perhaps because he shared the full name of a character I'd made up and written about in the margins of several school assignments (a very talented creature, he'd made appearances on math homework, English essays, Spanish tests, continually exasperating teachers who wondered how the heck they could stop me from doodling)?

No, I was not a normal child.