2005-05-20 - 8:08 p.m.
I�m done done done. I turned in my last paper ever this afternoon. I can�t quite wrap my head around this idea yet; I expect it�ll take a few days. It�s been three years here. Maybe 13, in some ways. Wow. What did it all mean? I don�t really know yet. I guess now is when I try to figure this out.
As my dad once said in anticipation of retirement as an elementary school principal: No more pencils. No more books. No more teachers� dirty looks. Or as someone a long time ago said back at Harvard in the limbo between finishing all one�s work and commencement: �Wow, I don�t know what to do with myself. I could look through the facebook again. But I guess it doesn�t really matter now.�
There are a lot of people I want to tell the news and thank. Exes and old friends I haven�t talked to in years. I also received some contact information for Laura Rothenberg�s folks. I want to tell them how much she meant to me. People I asked said I should go ahead and do this. They can handle it if I bring up a departed loved one.
It�s funny, I talked to Alithea today for the first time in almost six months. After I finished, it occurred to me that I owe a good bit of being here to her. We talked enough for me to realize that I don�t really understand who she is now. Maybe I never did. Maybe she never did. Harvard Law seems to have gone okay in the end, if very hard at first. She got a summer job at a big name British firm in Frankfurt. Good for her, I guess.
But she referred to some guy she said reminded her of me as �milquetoast�. I protested. Was I milquetoast? But when I think back on how I was, who I was, maybe she�s right. Desperately paying rent for and taking out someone I knew deep down had stopped caring about me, had stopped being intimate or even kissing me. I suppose I can�t really argue much, although it�s a hell of a thing for her, of all people, to bring up.
Whatever. Fuck her. I�ve got places to see and people to be. The real world is starting again for me. I never really thought this would actually happen, but oh my God. I�m going to be a college graduate.
� 2005 Geoff Gladstone
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