10.01.2001

Dear Alice,
I'm writing you this from my high-school style
desk (yellow plastic chair attached) in ENG 217.
We're discussing one of those good, but not
that good stories. The kind your teacher always
has some kind of personal/professional relation to
so you spend the whole class talking about it
until everyone agrees with the teacher's defensive
analyses. I'm still petty enough to be annoyed
that I got a 'B' on my last essay
instead of an 'A', so maybe that's influencing
this a bit.
It's strange how I never see you on campus,
as if we still went to different schools. But
most of my classes are in the morning and I
guess yours are afternoons.
I haven't ever met anyone in Sean's family. Is
that weird? He doesn't like to talk to his
father, I think he calls him once a month or so
when he absolutely has to and then he's always really
careful to block the number first so his dad
can't call us back. Sean says his dad's
schizophrenic and tells me strange, fucked-up
stories of things he's done. That scares me--
the part of him being schizophrenic. I worry
about the psychic's predicting my own tribe
of children. Think about my own unhappy genes
and try to calculate the chances of any one
particular child becoming schitzo if both his parents
carry similar genes. Is that dumb? It's not
just that, of course, you know I don't
really want to have kids that much, although
I think I might, someday. Because I'm
also trying to figure our own probable
proportions of sanity.