February 14, 1994

At present, it is 6:15 pm; that is, the big hand is on the three and the little hand on the six. On the clock at the BHS auditorium, Act I, Scene 7 of Rodgers & Hammerstein's classic musical SOUTH PACIFIC. Marilyn Bi3lby's six-year-old brother Tony is drawing a little color marker scene on notebook paper. It looks like an upside down tree. I'd like to clear some things up if I may. First of all, if you've been reading this journal chronologically; that is, not in any special collections like "Best of JMC Journals 1992-94!" or the poem "Quotations,"¹ you may be sensing that it seems like every day that I've been thinking about Shanna or Katie or that Stacie & I are on the verge of splitsville, to use this hip teenage jive (or gossip column lingo), and of course, that logic has absolutely no merit. Rather, we're having a pretty lovely Valentine's Day ourselves ... (Awww! Tony drew a palm tree!) ... and she's actually wearing (get this) jeans today. I cannot fathom my level of disbelief.² Speaking of which, Amy O'Bry@n and Kevin Mehn3rt might have a little romance evolving. And speaking of evolution, Mr. Sch00b³ alluded to it this morning as we started Chapter 11: REPRODUCTION! Mr Schoob ... what a guy. I think Chris T0desco said it best when he said (and repeated to our favorite April-born teacher, John W@llin, at Family Fun Night), "Mr Schoob is like a videotape. He's on > PLAY during the school year and goes on << REWIND in the summer." "And it was the biggest organism in the world!! Well, maybe not the biggest..." He's trying to convince us that we should really start thinking about science as a career. Yeah, right. He says, "Well, if you wanted to be, say, a writer, and there aren't a lot of writing opportunities, then it would help to be a chemist." I say, "There are a lot of things in between writing and chemistry." And he goes off on this lecture to me. I mean, he's got a point, but really, for me, I'd rather take up a job I like for less money than to be a chemist, no matter what it pays. 10 minute break!
JMC 6:36 pm

1 "The Best of JMC Journals 1992-94" was exactly as it sounds, a typed-up compilation of some of my favorite entries (ah, the beginnings of my impulse to archive my life), and "Quotations" was a poem-collage based on this document, where I first isolated all of the quoted dialogue and then rearranged it.

2 Stacie always wore skirts, a habit I always chalked up to taste until she admitted a couple years later that it was at least partially informed by some edict in Leviticus or Deuteronomy against women wearing men's clothing. Her churchgoing ways hardly got in the way of our close friendship until she decided to go to a very conservative Baptist college, and I feared it would put strains on our relationship past graduation.

2 Soporific, sandy-mustachioed biology teacher.