Let’s see. There are so many ways I could start this blog post.

I think I’ll start it by talking about college.

I went to a school you probably haven’t heard of, unless you’re a guidance counsellor or a Midwestern botanist, say. I was neither of these, but I was drawn to Carleton College for its lack of pretentiousness, its lack of fraternities, and its lack of New England prepsters.

I had just survived four years of boarding school, just barely, and I put up a big, aggravating fight about how I did not want to go to college at all.

“Well, what are you going to do instead???” my parents rightly demanded of their idiotic daughter.

I wanted to hitchhike around America like Kerouac (oh boy), and I wanted to move to Nepal (oh come on), and I wanted to write (oh for the love of god).

But my parents knew as much as I did that I had zero skills to support myself in a college-less life. Zero. So they won the argument, and this poor-little-white-girl went off to college, miserably.

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Newsflash. I recently updated this post after many years and discovered that some of the script was disabled. And I have absolutely no idea - I mean NO idea - what any of the junk I wrote above has anything to do with the images below.

So let’s hear it for flawless segues, shall we. Have yourself a cockatoo and maybe write in the comments a version where these ragged ribbons of unpaved life make sense.