I would probably be more productive as a human being if I actually acted like the seventeen-year-old girl that I so often feel like I am.
             I've been thinking about this a lot. Not just today. Not just since I made the bet with the kid. The stakes are high. We each have to keep a blog every day until the end of his spring break and the first one of us who fails to update on the daily basis has to buy the other one a frozen yogurt. I told him that if we both manage to keep the blog then I'll buy us both a frozen yogurt and him a new book. I don't want to lose a bet to a 12-year-old. What sort of role model would I be? I want us to be tied. I want to have to buy this kid a book. I want him to have to read...Good Lord, I hope he isn't reading this.
      Here's what I mean by the seventeen thing... Imagine having to be awake by 6:30am five days a week-- no exceptions. Imagine someone forcing you to exercise 45-minutes 5 days a week and not for your health but for a grade because we've been deluded into thinking that our futures somehow depend upon it... imagine being forced to read books and then have to write about them and learning a foreign language--because you have a test on it. Think of taking the part time job after the 30-plus hours a week at school just because you want spending money, a new guitar or a car...and the guitar lessons... oh God, think of how once upon a time someone believed in you so much that they bought you guitar lessons and do you know what you did with those guitar lessons? Nothing...because the homework for that still felt like homework. Stupid. And imagine that despite all of this, you still had so much time on your hands that you actually felt bored.
     "What are you doing right now? Want to go to the record store? I'm bored."
     When I was seventeen, I used to be able to write about 20 pages of fiction a day-- because my imagination was just that strong. 
     I have to wrap this up. It's almost midnight and any post after midnight means that I lost... if I lose, I definitely can't lose on the first day. I'm preparing myself. I'm ready. I'm not only going to spend the next couple of weeks in competition with the kid. I'm going to spend the next couple of weeks living like I'm seventeen. I mean, I already do that in someways. I have the Shangri-Las "I Can Never Go Home Any More" on the portable turntable on the floor next to the shag rug where I can lay really close to the speaker while it softly serenades me so that I don't wake anyone up with the noise. I have a newly purchased F. Scott Fitzgerald collection and a framed photo of a man who I wish was my sweetheart on my night table.
     Might as well learn a few things while I'm at it.