A few days ago, a mysterious package arrived on my doorstep. When I opened it, it turned out to be a “Class Book” that Stanford had thoughtfully put together to presage our Class of ’91 reunion, with a listing of all ’91 alumni and a page for each alum. Very thoughtful of my alma mater….
…huh???
You see, I didn’t graduate from Stanford. I left after one year, and finished up at Caltech, which is my honest-to-goodness alma mater, not Stanford. This has not, however, prevented Stanford from sending me cheery little alumni newsletters, requests for donations, etc. for the last twenty years. Their persistence is quite remarkable.
But that’s not the funny part. The funny part is that, while I received a copy of the Class Book, I was not invited to participate in it. Apparently I’m enough of an alum to get a copy, but not enough to contribute to it. I find this uproariously funny. It’s entirely appropriate, of course – it’s not like I’m actually an alum – but it’s still really funny. I’m glad they sent it to me, though, because it has been fun flipping through it and seeing what my old classmates have been up to. Sadly, I’ve forgotten most of their names, but every once in awhile something will ring a bell. The Class Correspondent, for example, is my former freshman roommate, who was instrumental in getting me to Caltech. (I knew something was terribly, terribly wrong when I walked into my dorm room that first day, wearing tie-dyes and flip-flops, and found myself confronted with a neatly dressed preppy in makeup and little gold earrings. Things went rapidly downhill from there…neat/messy, liberal/conservative….people theorized that they had matched up 1,636 frosh and had the two of us left over.)
The Class Book committee is headed up by someone who was on my hall…and one of my classmates, whom I barely remember, became a professional triathlete! It’s been fascinating leafing through the book and seeing where people wound up. I actually kind of wish they’d invited me to participate, it would have been interesting to relate my story. But of course it doesn’t belong there. Too bad Caltech doesn’t do anything similar, but with only about 200 students graduating each year, it would be an awfully thin book. I love my alma mater, but it (unsurprisingly) lacks the social graces and polish of Stanford.
Anyway, creatively speaking, I’ve made only minor progress today. I sent off the basic draft of my rep weave samples to the very gracious Rosalie Neilson, who corrected it for me (thanks Rosalie!). I started drafting up the samples, but soon realized that I needed to finish writing the article before I could design the samples. So I’m working on that. Right now it feels like an octopus – I have 1400 words’ worth of tentacular thoughts, drifting through a soupy sea of color theory, but nothing that really ties everything together. I need to come up with the three or four things I really want to communicate to the reader, and center the article around that. Sadly, work pretty much fried my brain today (I have one project releasing next week and one the week after, so you can guess why my head is spinning right now!), so I’ve been puttering around instead of working on it. Tomorrow morning I’ll give it another try.
When I realized that the public HS in Ft Lauderdale was the last place I could expect decent teaching, my mom and I looked into alternatives. I actually had my heart set on the Catholic HS which had my good Episcopalian mum in a tizzy, so we “chatted” with the local private school, Pine Crest. Ultimately, having become perhaps the only teenager to ever BEG to go to a Catholic School (all my friends were there…no-brainer) I went there and got an AMAZING education from the Domincan sisters (who are amazing ladies)..um, but, the point of this little ramble being that for years later I constantly go mail from the private school, starting “Dear Alum” and I had never even gotten around to filling out the application! It does get a bit silly, non?