It Was Like Christmas Morning!... Only This Time It Was Only The Two Of Us!" "Oh, Man! I'd Forgotten How Fun A Three-Couple Orgy Can Be!". I think that's basically the gist of it. Of course there was also some political stuff going on, about the current presidential campaign. Which I think was interesting, but more because it revealed something more about the three gals than about the candidate himself, who was rather boring. I suppose that's the usual way most political news programs work nowadays, so I don't need to tell you why that's unfortunate. Thursday, February 20, 2014 At the start of the school year we were assigned partners in the English II class at Newfield High, and as we settled in with our new partners I was thinking about how I always got with the "interesting" kids. And we did have some interesting people in our class, but my partner was one of them. She was an interesting person, all right. In fact, I'm pretty sure I saw her name on a postcard from an art museum or something. This is what I remember from when she was here for the year. She was a student at a private high school called "Wildewood High" (Wildewood is where she lived), but she had been placed in Newfield for some kind of college prep program. It's the only school that's ever done that, I think. This was the first time that any of our students had been sent to a public school, so at first we were all worried. But it turns out that it was a good move for her because it forced her to meet kids from all kinds of different kinds of family backgrounds, and it got her in touch with many aspects of the world around her that she wouldn't have been exposed to otherwise. She came back to visit our class at least once during the year, though. In one class I got to see her reading a book about a real famous poet named Edgar Allen Poe. She and I were in the same computer lab during that class, and I have to tell you she looked so weird. So different. As if she'd gone over into another dimension. And what was really weird was that she looked like Edgar Allen Poe himself. Like she'd just stepped out of one of those photos in Poe's life that always show him holding his head in his hands, looking like he's trying to look inside it to find the answer to life's deepest mystery. Like he's feeling like he's trapped in a room that the rest of us can't see. But the more I studied her face I felt she was somehow more real than Poe, with her face turned upward so that it was lit from below by the screen, and sort of in shadow. If she'd been standing there in the same spot as Edgar Allen Poe it would have looked like she was standing inside his head. And for some reason this really bothered me. I've mentioned that whenever I had questions about something before I would always look up to the top of the page and down to the bottom and see if anything had anything to say about it. And I was doing that the day I first noticed her. When I looked down I saw that a line of text from "For Whom the Bell Tolls," which we had read in our class but Poe had not, was on the page. And I remember reading that and the strange picture that it made in my mind. Poe trapped inside that room, but he wasn't standing with his face in his hands, and he was reading a line from his own poetry. The poem that the poem about the man trapped inside of the house with his face in his hands is based on. So I went to talk to him and said, "What was that all about? What happened to you?" And he said something about how some kids had made him feel the way they make kids feel at home and so he left, thinking that maybe the only thing he could do to help himself feel better was to walk away from it all. That's when I told him that I knew that. That I'd been just like that myself, and he told me about how he was at an all-boy Catholic school until the last year, and how even when he was away from home, even when he went to school here in Newfield, even when he could do anything he wanted to do on campus, when he was at school he felt like an outsider. That was part of the reason why his parents had chosen to send him to the private high school. They wanted him to grow up surrounded by other Catholic kids and, of course, they wanted to give him a Catholic education, which meant he had to go to a Catholic high school. But it seemed to be getting him down. "I don't think it's good for him," I said to him. "I think he's going to end up feeling worse." "Oh, I know," he said. "I feel trapped, too," he said. "We can't all be that trapped. The more people do the same things all the time the more people get trapped. That's the rule of life. We all have to make a choice to be different than the other people." I didn't think of the other choice of course. I just thought he should be able to decide for himself, to act like a grown-up and be the kind of person he wants to be. In the face of a situation he doesn't understand, he has a lot of choices that can make him feel more comfortable. I know that sounds easy, but it's hard to do if you're growing up, if you're figuring out who you are, and sometimes you can't just follow the crowd. That's what I told him, and he said, "You know what? I never thought of it that way before. I'm a poet and I've never really thought of poetry as having a choice." But to his credit, he had read the Edgar Allan Poe poem. The part where the person inside the house is thinking about the person who's left and wondering if he'll ever find a place in the world where he belongs. I know that was a lot of things, but it seems a lot of things went on at school last year for me. I didn't feel like that was the sort of thing I should be doing when I went to school, and it sure wasn't what my girlfriend was up to. The more I saw her face in the classroom the more real she seemed to me, and that kind of upset me a little bit. That's why I started sitting with her during lunchtime, when it was easier for me to walk to her room instead of getting up and going back to my own class. I would sit on her desk, which is what a lot of the other kids did. I'd sit on it, listening to them talk, and look down at my laptop, but I had my eyes on her. And I watched her at her desk. It was just like watching someone eat a meal in a movie or something. And it was the only reason I'm telling you this story. Even now it still makes me sad when I think about it, because I know I shouldn't have been doing that. It's just too dangerous for me, to be sitting there and watching her. In that class, it was like watching an egg at work. Like watching a chicken, for instance. Which is something I've been telling you about. You know how there are a lot of different types of chickens? Well, there are all different kinds of eggs. But the point of this story is that there are a lot of different ways chickens eat eggs. Just like there are a lot of ways kids eat their lunch. Because at first, like with the chicken, the thing that was the most interesting was watching the egg. But in the case of the egg, the shell was there to protect it. But when you think about what she was doing, how she was doing it, there was no shell. It was like some kind of experiment to me, watching her peck at the top of her food with a very specific kind of purpose, so she didn't get any food on her face or anything like that. There was something about the way she acted that I still don't understand. But no matter how hard I tried, I never could imagine that what she was doing was for her own good. So I never saw her again. She was moved from our class to a different section of the building. I thought maybe she