This story was published in 2007 for FastWeb, an online education resource and scholarship search engine.

This week I’m going to write about persimmons. Oh yes, that most noble of fruits. No, hang on, that’s wrong. You’ll have to excuse me (well, you don’t have to, but it’d be a very generous move on your part). I’m graduating from college on Sunday and my brain’s just about full to capacity. Bet you didn’t know that could happen. It can. So don’t fill up your headspace with all those song lyrics, ok?

This week’s column, my last, is about persistence. My college career has been peppered with situations in which I had to just get through things, without complaining or ignoring the situation. The instances range from the serious — when I was a varsity athlete with asthma — to the trivial — my housemate’s sub-optimal hygiene habits.

I haven’t experienced the real world yet, but I figure persistence is going to continue to be a theme in life. Like watching cooking shows. That will probably be a theme too.

If things don’t go your way, sometimes you can change the circumstances and sometimes you can’t. The second option takes an entirely different skill set than the first. (Did you notice that term, “skill set?” That’s the kind of talk we graduates use. If someone had said those words to me my first year I would have thought they were talking about matching silverware.) Things don’t break your way and there are times you can’t get away from a bad situation, so you just have to persevere.

I’m not really prone to feeling sorry for myself, but I found that the less I complained about a situation, the easier it was to get through. I might mention an unpleasant experience to a friend; I might even mention it in what some would call a whiny voice. But to anyone directly involved — a coworker or boss — I kept my mouth shut. Don’t advertise your unhappiness. The few times I was uncomfortable in a workplace and kept my complaints to myself — they weren’t constructive, but personal annoyances — my actions ended up benefiting me through cool promotions, glowing letters of recommendation and so on.

College is designed to teach you to be persistent. Every student wants to befriend the great teachers, so you have to stand out academically and in personality. You’re separated from your family and hometown. You might not like your roommate, your resident advisor, your academic advisor, your lunchlady … Unless you’re lucky, there will be required classes you have to take and you may hate them. You may have to work a job that you dislike. The bad news is that most of these things can’t be changed without a lot of stress and effort on everyone’s part. The good news is they all have a time limit.

Persistence takes a certain mindset (different from a skill set, but nearly as useful). Think of your trials and tribulations as mountains: They’re high, they’re serious and they’re unpleasant to go through, but a finite number of steps will get you over them. Every day the end comes closer, so chin up. Be tough and resilient and the persimmons of your labors will come to you.

Thank you for reading this year and for sending me your thoughts. I’ll be at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism in the fall, so keep your eyes peeled for more parentheses, more puns and a lot more of my writing!

This story was published in 2007 for FastWeb, an online education resource and scholarship search engine.

The good and bad things of life lie on a spectrum. At the top: scoring the winning goal in a hockey game, baking a perfect soufflé, giving someone a gift they’ve been secretly yearning for. At the bottom: kicking puppies, Gwen Stefani’s new CD, genocide.

But below that, much farther down, comes one thing more evil than even Gwen’s misguided attempts at musicality …

The study of linguistics.

I’d allow you a moment to relieve the chill that has settled in your soul at my mention of this foul-breathed thing, but at 600 words a column, I haven’t got time for pauses. We must go on.

“Going on” is the theme for this week’s chat. More specifically, how to do it. I’m in my last semester of college and taking 20 credits. For those of you not yet in college or those of you too far past it to remember, the usual limit is 17 credits per semester, meaning I had to get special permission to do this to myself. I hadn’t planned to take this many, but there were classes I wanted to experience and, well, this is my last chance.

You might have guessed, but linguistics was not one of the classes I wanted to experience. In fact, I’m seriously considering paying someone else to experience it for me. Someone I really don’t like. (Gwen Stefani?)

My problem is all because of foresight. Taking one linguistics course is a requirement for my Anthropology major; I tried taking the class twice before, but each time the experience was so painful, I withdrew while I could still drop the class. I decided to take linguistics my final semester, so if I was as terribly untalented as I imagined, a poor grade wouldn’t hurt my GPA and chances at getting into graduate school. I was under the impression that I was being smart.

Oh, cruel folly! How mistaken I was. Now I’m faced with the situation that I’m in a class I need to graduate, I have a higher workload than I’ve ever had before, and if I can’t get myself together, there are serious consequences. I’m, like a dinosaur in a tar pit, stuck.

You might be wondering why this class is so hard. The answer is — I just haven’t got the head for linguistics. It takes me a very long time to understand the readings we do for homework. The whole subject seems ridiculous in its expectations. When I received a C+ on a paper that asked me to analyze the internal inconsistencies of the Hungarian language – a lingo I’ve never heard, seen or spoken – I emitted a “Hallelujah!” that must have set the heavens ringing.

But back to the point. It’s helpful to know I don’t have to ace the class. I just have to get a C to receive credit. This is nice, but when it’s Sunday afternoon and I have to sit down to 400 pages of inverted sentences and lexicological diagrams, it’s enough to make me want to cry. The only solution to my problem – and to similar problems you might have — is to tough it out. There are only 18 linguistics class periods left (you better believe I’ve counted) and I’m a smart person. I am bright enough to make sense of what these dusty linguists have to say. I will get through this.

With a C+, if I’m lucky.

This story was published in 2007 for FastWeb, an online education resource and scholarship search engine.

A month after taking the GRE, what I remember most is the GR part. (“Grrrrr” n. 1. exclamation indicating extreme frustration, 2. sound a bear makes.) You see, I’ve gotten my scores.

I’m in the 91st percentile on verbal, which means only 9 percent of this year’s test takers scored higher than me. (I am also in the 91st percentile for people who disregard statistics.) Here’s where the GRE is different from the SAT – percentage is worth more to schools than your actual number. It’s more important to place highly among your peers than to get a big number score.

You might have noticed I didn’t start with my math score. How astute of you. That is because I’m in the 15th percentile there, meaning just about everyone scored higher than me. The people around me, the people not around me, the receptionist…. students who didn’t even take the test did better than me! The fact is, however, my success in journalism probably won’t hinge on my geometry skills. And I didn’t study for the math section. In fact, after I tried practice questions and was asked to find the radius of a square within a circle with the variable x – an equation with two shapes and no numbers – I threw the book under my bed and tried not to think about it. And then I drew variables (X’s) on my eyes to signify acknowledgment of my impending doom.

The point of this column isn’t just to reveal my abysmal score in a public arena. Instead, it’s to tell you that I don’t think the GRE matters much when it comes to admissions. As a note, I have no experience on admissions boards, nor do I have any inside information. I’m going on logic and the experiences of my friends and relatives. (Logic wasn’t tested in the GRE, but you can trust me.)

Firstly, the amount of importance the GRE has in your application varies drastically from school to school. Columbia University, one of the top journalism schools in the country, doesn’t require it for their general program. The Univeristy of Missouri, however, (another top j-school) has a cutoff – you have to score over 1000 to even apply.

If you do poorly on the SAT, you’re like a deflated basketball – it’s hard for you to bounce back. I suspect that many schools have an SAT score cutoff point, so if you don’t do well, they may not even look at your application. Graduate schools are a different kettle of fish. It’s like auditioning for MTV’s The Real World. You have to convince them that you’ll be an asset to their program while you’re there, and as my mother puts it, a good ambassador for them once you graduate. You have to be unique and different, but fundamentally the same as them – they want to feel connected to you and know that you share the same values (not moral values, but work ethic, dedication and so forth) but also think you bring something different to the table.

In the end, I got used to the fact that I’m worthless when it comes to math. The rest of my application is strong, and hopefully, I’ll get into grad school. I think 15th percentile is just a blow to my ego, not a death knell.

This story was published in 2006 for FastWeb, an online education resource and scholarship search engine.

My full name is Mary Rebecca Wilkinson Seltzer, but I’ve been called Molly since I can remember. I grew up on a beef cattle farm in the mountains of Virginia, right on the West Virginia line. I am an anthropology and Spanish double major with an English minor at the University of Virginia.

I joined the newspaper my second year and became an arts and entertainment writer. Mostly, I write about music, but I have experience with hard news stories, features, other A&E subjects like theater and literature and – in a particularly daring moment– a short series on economic and financial issues.

I’ve had an unabashed affair with wordplay my whole life. I love puns, love them. I also overuse parentheses and have an unexplainable affection for hyphens.

Roald Dahl, Max Schulman and P.G. Wodehouse are my favorite authors. Recently, I’ve been reading a lot of E.B. White and A.J. Liebling. (It seems many great writers shorten their names; I consider it an unfortunate twist of fate that my initials are M.R. Seltzer.)

I like to live the high life … you know, polishing silver and licking envelopes. I go to a lot of concerts, which helps me make a lot of friends. I often bake, which helps me keep them. I’m an avid sports fan and root for the Redskins, the Pacers and the Pirates – mainly because they need it. I take great pleasure in writing letters to family members and friends in faraway places. It is unclear whether they are ever opened.

I’m excited to share my thoughts (discerning), insights (considerable) and experiences (enthralling) throughout this process.

And … I ask you to bear with me.

This story was published in 2006 for FastWeb, an online education resource and scholarship search engine.

I’m always looking for new places to study, cozy bookshops or buzzy cafes. My new favorite destination is a cross between a library and a kindergarten playroom. It’s called University Career Services and it just might be your salvation.

Most colleges have some department like this, staffed by guidance counselor/librarian types. It’s meant to fill the gap when you left behind your parents, high school teachers and the administrators who know you. One of the most startling things about college is that there’s no one to check up on you. This is nice if you’ve skipped class or aren’t paying your library fines, but it puts all the responsibility on you when it comes to deadlines and meeting requirements.

I first visited UCS my third year to look at their resources on summer internships. They had a hefty collection of reference materials that referred me to other reference materials that referred me to company Web sites, which I like to think would have occurred to me without the help. Mission unsuccessful.

I returned this year to scope out how to prep for the GRE. I asked for help from one of the workers and had a much different experience. She plopped down on the floor with me and sorted through a stack of books taller and more formidable than Shaquille O’Neal. She was able to help find me the right study guides, but also work through the arduous task of signing up to take the test, finding the nearest testing site, and deciding whether or not I should drink seven cups of coffee beforehand. (My opinion was yes, hers was maybe.)

I’ve been back several times, once solely for this article. Almost every time I have seen a person sniffling in a corner. Poor downtrodden college students… they don’t know what to do, where to go or who to be. My feeling is that the students that shuffle into UCS are on their last leg. They’ve exhausted all their own resources and see seeking advice as a form of weakness. They’re fragile and one sarcastic comment could shatter them.

But UCS handles it. The workers swoop down on the soggy students like giant, mothering bats. They swab faces with Kleenex and block out anyone who might observe the tears. They’ll listen as you sob brokenly about how you’re a graduating senior and you’ve never had an internship and no company will want you because you’ve majored in astronomy and you ran out of résumé paper so you printed on normal computer paper and will that eliminate you automatically and …

Perhaps it is not a mistake that the acronym UCS could also stand for University Counseling Services. I’m not sure it was the University of Virginia’s intent to have a service that offers a shoulder to cry on as well as a helping hand, but that seems to be some function of the department. And I think it’s a niche that needs to be filled.

I would suggest visiting your version of University Career Services before you’re at your wit’s end. They are a valuable, under-utilized resource and will listen as you stress about whether you’re going to make something of yourself or not. They’ll be useful for technical questions about graduate school, internships, jobs, taking important tests, your own college’s administration or anything you would have asked your high school guidance counselor.

And take them something nice when you visit. They deserve it.

This story was published in 2006 for FastWeb, an online education resource and scholarship search engine.

It’s 90 degrees and there is a small breeze. Somewhere an insect is buzzing. I am in my recliner, reclining. It’s lazy out. And there’s still one gorgeous hour left until my next class starts.

Class? But it’s the middle of August!

It’s buggy, muggy and a million degrees. I arrive at lectures looking like I’ve spent the morning paddling around under Niagara Falls. (When the mosquitoes are whining, I feel entitled to join in.) But the worst part about summer is not how quickly it passes. In my mind, the stupid season won’t take the hint and leave. It hangs around, slowly pulling away from me like taffy from a finger.

I think the worst (and best) part of summer is deciding how to spend it. Which brings us to this week’s question – what’s the best thing to do during your college summers?

There are plenty of pleasant ways to while away the sunny months. Traveling is a wonderful choice. As a student, you aren’t shackled to a job, family or pet and your parents might still be feeling sentimental enough to toss a few bucks your way. Lots of kids go to Europe, but I’d rather choose somewhere off the beaten path. (Like Iowa. What’s in Iowa, I ask you? Go find out.)

Interning is the best way to snag job-oriented experience, though if you want to go into a popular field, an internship is a way to keep up with your peers, not get ahead of them. To find a gig that suits your needs, do your homework (I know it sounds alarmingly like school, but trust me). You want an offer that will allow you to 1) learn as much as possible and make as many connections as you can and 2) boost your résumé and help you get a job in the future. Interning is an intense experience and has the potential to teach you scads of helpful information. I want to stress, however, that no matter how competitive your field is, you have time to spend on less academic pursuits. Many employers value personal experiences – like travel or volunteering – as much as licking envelopes at a high-powered company.

I have a number of friends who use their summers to beef up the old bank account. Retail and restaurant work are the two most popular choices, and I fully admit to being jealous when these kids return to school flashing stylish new digs or the latest piece of cool technology.

The get-a-job plan sounds nice, but it has its pitfalls. One positive is that you get to spend time at home. This positive would also qualify as a rather large negative. You won’t do your own laundry, but you’ll have to be in by ten and explain every single pop culture reference you make. Total buzzkill.

Overwhelmed? Don’t despair. Choosing what to do with your summers is kind of like being in kindergarten again — options abound! You could be an astronaut or a firefighter or an athlete or a used car salesman or an intern or a waitress or a camp counselor or a roadie…

Do what you’re comfortable with, but don’t waste this time. As innocuous as they seem, these three vacations can be critical factors in determining what options you have in that most exciting of summers – the one after graduation.

If worst comes to worst and you get stuck with plans you hate, take comfort in the fact that in three months you’ll be back where you belong. In class.

This story was published in 2006 for FastWeb, an online education resource and scholarship search engine.

Last week, a friend and fellow writer had problems finding a captivating intro to his article.

“Write about toothpaste,” I said helpfully.
He looked at me.
I shrugged, “Hey, everybody’s got teeth.”

The fact is, not everyone has teeth. But I think everyone — at some point or another — has money. I have about as much of the sweet stuff as, oh, Mother Theresa, but even a student journalist can chance upon the occasional change. Which brings me to this week’s two-part question: How much should college cost and who should pay for it?

According to a recent article in The Wall Street Journal, tuition is rising at more than twice the rate of inflation. A year’s tuition at a private college now costs an average of $21,000. That means if you don’t qualify for financial aid and haven’t won a scholarship, you could graduate $84,000 in debt. Just think! That $84,000 is enough to buy 280 iPods, one for each resident of the Aleutian Islands, give or take a few. (I don’t want to offend any Aleuts in my reading audience — the actual area population is about 8,000.)

The justification for an expensive degree is that it will ultimately pay off. Shelling out $45,000 a year for a Harvard diploma is supposed to get you a sought-after job in your field and connections out the wazoo. Well I say, wazoo schmazoo.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but one of the principles of free-market economy is that competition controls and lowers prices. Having choices isn’t our problem; I would say the number of colleges in America is rivaled only by the number of whitening toothpastes. (Most people have teeth. It’s relevant.) Competition isn’t controlling costs, and colleges are charging whatever they want us to pay. OPEC is more price-responsive to its market than private four-year colleges are to their degree guzzlers.

So why can’t we keep costs down?

Many students are more concerned with how we’ll pay instead of how much we’ll pay. We worry about who licks their thumb and peels off another bill. There are usually two options: you or your folks. Perhaps your ‘rents should pay your rent. They’ve funded you most of your life already. Besides, don’t they want you to get the full, fancy-free experience?

Or maybe college, when most kids turn 18 and 21, is exactly the time to take over the financial responsibilities.

I think the government should cap how much private institutions charge. We have national policies to limit drug and medical expenses; why not education?

I’d also like the higher-ups to lend a hand with everyone’s education. Think about it. The feds pay for me to attend college. My degree helps me qualify for a higher salary and the higher salary means I pay more in taxes. In theory, if the government helped more Americans get college degrees, it’d get more money back. This is essentially what the GI Bill did for WWII veterans, and it helped establish an educated middle class that has paid back America a hundred times over.

I don’t know much about economics, but I’m familiar with the cost of college. And if we don’t start talking about it now, my children’s education will cost their weight in gold.

Gold teeth, that is.

I like Christmas. I like the gift-giving because I’m generally a very good guesser when it comes to figuring out what someone wants. I like the food because it involves showing off one of my few skills (The baking, not the consuming. Ahem.). And I like writing holiday cards.

Throughout my life (short, if you’re a octogenarian, long if you’re a caterpillar), I’ve built a reputation for writing really great cards. I’ve made people cry, made them laugh, made the least likely to write back respond within days. I have two penpals in the military, both in Iraq, but more impressively, I have an astounding 100+ greeting cards ready to be sent to eager friends. (I counted them just for this column, and I didn’t include the sheets of special handmade paper or sticker collection.)

The December month for me is filled with red candles, baked goods of all kinds and events, like last week’s gingerbread-house decorating party.

The month is also packed with cards. Lots and lots of greeting cards.

I have about 75 people I MUST send a note to and about 50 others that I ought to write. This year, I’m having trouble getting started on my list. Perhaps it’s because, to date, I have received ONE card. And it’s from a former editor so it practically doesn’t count.

It’s also because the past few months have been some of the hardest in my life. Joyous and full of progression and movement, but hard. Very hard. So what do I write in my cards? I can muster the usual non-sequitur jokes, the goofy signature, but I worry I won’t have much news.

It’s my first year in the working world and I find it difficult to keep track of successes as concretely as I used to. In internships, you finish the employment. You get a recommendation. In school, you complete a course, you build toward your major. In my graduate school, you get a piece published. There are built-in ways of measuring progress and success. Two -ess’s I’m finding very important to my life.

In the year (almost) that I’ve lived in New York, I can tick only two things off my list. I got a challenging job and a beautiful apartment. They weren’t easy feats, and I am certainly not taking them for granted, but the -ess’s are scarcer than they used to be.

I’ve made up for it in other ways. I’ve become — those of you who know me will howl with laughter — a bikram yogi. This means I practice high-intensity, fast-paced yoga in a 120-degree room for 90 minutes, five days a week. This is not the focus-on-the-end-of-your-nose, tinkly music kind of yoga. Last week, I made it through my first session where I completed every posture. To put this into perspective, for the first week or two that you practice bikram, the goal is simply to stay in the room for the full 90 minutes.

I signed up for a pottery class, and I’m working on ways to practice (and hopefully revive) my Spanish skills. All of these are in an effort to create goals that can be easily understood in terms of accomplishment.

But holidays are about ham, not hamstrings. Chimneys, not kilns. Nobody wants a card about that.

This story was published June 24, 2005, during an internship at Richmond.com.

Everyone is familiar with the popular children’s story, Peter Pan. Though it’s a favorite of mine, I always disliked Peter’s dealings with his shadow. For starters, he’s irresponsible enough to lose track of it, but then he tries to reattach the thing with a bar of soap. I remember thinking, “What a dweeb. Everyone knows that you can’t lose your shadow and there’s no way you could stick it back on with soap.” I might even have tacked on an exasperated, “Duh,” and a put-upon sigh. (I was a pretty flavorful kid.)

Even though Peter was lacking a few ounces of gray matter, he managed to hit upon an interesting aspect of human nature – people’s fascination with their own shadows. The Children’s Museum of Richmond is looking to cash in on kids’ interest with the new exhibit, ” Shadow Play ,” which will be officially unveiled on Saturday, June 25 at 10 a.m.

Funded by a grant from the Verizon Foundation, “Shadow Play” is an interactive exhibit that uses technology to produce digital representations of nature that play off children’s shadows. A segment of the exhibit was featured as a fantasy gift in the 2003 Neiman Marcus Christmas Catalog, where the caption read, “It’s about the ‘wow’ of capturing the majesty inherent in nature and giving you the chance to revel in it.”

What does this all mean? Why would anyone want the chance to revel in the majesty inherent in nature? Is a shadow really cool enough to be a fantasy gift? I, too, was a doubter. And then I got a sneak preview of “Shadow Play.”

When I walked into the darkened room in the Children’s Museum, I couldn’t see what all the secrecy was about. Then everything came alive. The floor seethed with three-foot children; the walls danced with their ten-foot shadows. Kids swarmed in packs around four large screens where brightly-colored images rolled, swelled and poured. As I got used to the darkness, I noticed the intricate connections between the projectors hanging from the ceiling and the cameras attached to the screens. I also noted that the neon images on the screens were interacting with the children’s shadows.

One screen showed a swarm of butterflies. They flitted from corner to corner in disarray, but when a shadow hit the screen, the butterflies settled on it. Most kids struggled to stand still long enough for the insects to land, but the effect of a butterfly perched on your shadow’s nose or eyelashes was well worth the effort.

Another screen had neon-colored blobs that moved like amoebas, squirting and swimming along. You could push them with your shadow and sometimes, if they ran into another blob, they joined forces and changed colors.

The third screen depicted about 20 marbles. Oversized and delicately colored, the marbles rolled back and forth across the screen. Kids herded them into a corner, smacked them into each other and grouped them according to colors. Beware the twist, because as soon as they were grouped, the colors changed to a new hue and the sorting began again.

The most popular exhibit was one in which a stream of liquid sand poured from the top of the projector, reacting with the children’s shadows as if they were solid. Thus, if a child held an umbrella, the sand skated off the edges, and if the umbrella was turned upside down, the sand built up inside it. The best part of this screen was that the stream of sand could be redirected, meaning you could pour it on someone else’s head, usually without them knowing. (The exhibits are engrossing — at one point, I found that I’d been standing for ten minutes with my nose pressed to the screen, desperately trying to squish two amoeba blobs together.) Claire Mehalick , exhibit coordinator of the Children’s Museum sympathized with me: “The effect is so captivating that we think the parents will want to jump in and play as much as their children will.”

Before I previewed “Shadow Play,” I envisioned kids making shadow puppets with flashlights and finger dolls. But after I saw the exhibit – nay, interacted with the exhibit – I was charmed. Never mind the cool graphics, this exhibit will teach you something about yourself. And as its creators query, “What’s a more natural extension of yourself than your own shadow?”

I suggest pulling a Peter Pan and flying to the Children’s Museum of Richmond to play with your shadow. I promise, once you start, you’ll realize that soap is just unnecessary.

This story was a USA-Weekend Student Fiction Contest Runner Up. It was published on June 4, 2000, when I was 14.

“You have to tell us everything, Wog, I have to know!” said my mother. I pretended not to hear her. “Stop looking out the window.”

I tore my eyes away from the garden outside my window. My cat, Kitten, was rolling in the dirt. I had to look away quickly. The sight of the weeds choking out all the vegetables and sunflowers before they even had a chance to grow was just as bad a disaster as the one I was in.

“If you must know, I have a boyfriend, Simon. You know the guy I met at the fair last year?” The county fair takes place in August. I am looking forward to it this year because I’ll get to see Simon again and because of the Sno Cones. I love Sno Cones. I stole a glance at my mother’s face. One word applied to her face like makeup: disbelief.

“That boy! Your father is going to hit the roof!”

And with that she marched downstairs, and I could hear her saying, “Corky, did you know Wog had a boyfriend?”

Geez. Parents are such a drag, you know? I mean, I once made the mistake of trying to be humorous as a little kid. I was in the car with my father, and he asked me jokingly what I thought he was good for. Money and driving, I replied, and he took me seriously.

My dad is from Pennsylvania and my mom is from North Carolina. The only thing her parents told her to do when she went away to college was NOT to bring back a Yankee husband. When my father first went to meet Mom’s family, they hid the silver from him. It was 10 years before they stopped using plastic forks on Thanksgiving. Where’s the trust? Where is the trust? My dad is 54, and my mom, Melissa, is 46. We live on a cattle farm in the most rural part of Virginia. My school — high school, middle and elementary — adds up to a whopping 300 students, soaking wet.

You might be wondering why my mom called me Wog. That is my nickname. It comes from Molly Pollywog, which is what she called me when I was 3 months old and swimming in the pool with her. No matter how much I plead, she still continues calling me that, even in public! It’s bad enough when your parents sing along with the tape-recorded national anthem at our basketball games but when my mom booga-loos to the warm-up music before the game starts, I mean, someone hand me some cyanide! Sheesh. Now my classmates call me Wog.

Picture the three of us, outside on the picnic table in the July heat, eating hamburgers. Dad leans over and starts the interrogation.

“So,” he clears his throat, “what’s this I hear about a boy?”

“Dad!” This is so exasperating. “I’ve already told you at least twice.”

Another throat clearing. “Refresh my memory.”

“His name is Simon Davis. He lives in Richmond. We met at the fair last year, MOM met him at the fair last year, and he likes ’60s music.” I added the music part to butter the bread and avoid more throat-clearing.

He asks my mom, “What does this child look like?”

“DADDDDYYY! He’s not a child. We’ve been going for almost a year!”

“Going?” he asks.

“Going where?” she asks.

“Dad, you know, going out.”

“Going out where?”

“You know, dad, like, we’re hooked up.”

“Hooked up with what? Cord? String? Fishing wire?”

“DAD!”

“Hear that, Melissa?! She’s on dope! She said it herself, she’s hooked!”

“”I AM NOT!”

“Whatever. I have yet to see this … this … adolescent. What does he look like?”

“Dad, aren’t you always telling me that looks don’t count as long as he treats me right? Well, aren’t you?”

“Since when have you listened to me? If you can’t judge a book by its cover, what can you tell it by? What does he look like?”

“He’s tall, skinny, with green eyes and spikes.” As I delivered the hair part, my father’s face, which had been a reasonable red, turned the color of eggplant.

“Oh, so he plays baseball. Or is it track? Mel, what other sport uses spikes on the shoes?” I think they do this to me on purpose.

“Spiked hair, Daddy.”

“Oh.”

Truth is, I’m not all that excited about Simon. So what if he’s the first boyfriend I’ve had since sixth grade, not counting summer guys. He lives in Richmond, I live in Blue Grass, three hours away. He comes down for Christmas, spring break and the county fair, but that’s about it. So what if we talk until 1 and 2 in the morning when he’s here, doesn’t everybody? OK, everybody under 30? My own mother can only stay up until 8:30. And another thing, why do they think it so weird that some guy likes me? Can they just not handle the fact that (insert gasp here) I might be considered attractive? I mean, to anyone who didn’t change my diapers, my attractiveness might be appealing.

“So how have you two been communicating?” Dad asked.

“You know those big white boxes? The ones that make weird sounds when you play Mario on them? What are they called again?”

“Computers.” Mom shot me a nasty look.

“Ah, yes, computers. We’ve been using a thing called e-mail.”

“Are you prepared to go from e-mail to real male?” she asked. Ouch. That was a shot below the belt, Mummsy dear.

“It shouldn’t be a problem, Mommy. We’ve been talking every day. And it’s not like we cyber or anything.”

“Cyber? What’s a cyber?”

“Oh, you know, cyber sex.”

“Oh that!” Mom looked relieved. Pause. “What’s cyber sex?”

“GUYS!! I’m not going to be the one to tell you! Ask someone else.”

I went up to my room and read for a while. Later, when I went down to the kitchen for a chocolate Pop-Tart, I found Mom enjoying a healthful fruit salad.

“Chocolate gives you pimples.”

“Mother, it is clinically proven that chocolate does not produce excessive oil, causing pimples.”

“The Clearasil is in the upstairs cupboard.” It’s as if she never heard me. When she sees me heating the food, I am bombed with a Talk. A Talk is a one-way discussion concerning my weight, my grades, how insane my grandfather is, family history, anyone of the opposite sex, be it chimpanzee or goldfish, and the style of clothing I wear. After 10 minutes of this Talk, I headed back upstairs for my 18-hour beauty sleep.

AUG. 24, AT THE FAIR:

Simon and I are hanging out at the fair, our lips dyed blue and green from the Sno Cones. I’ve just spent the last hour prepping Simon on subjects my father is likely to quiz him on. We’ve covered the Beatles 1960-1967, Charles Dickens, how to give a good handshake, and the latest PBS program on the Maori tribe of New Zealand. My father, if you can’t tell, suffers from TMC. Too Much College.

I lead Simon over to my parents. Mom gives him a small smile but Dad remains ice cold. His stony face reflects the colored lights from the Ferris wheel as it moves in the background. Simon extends his hand. I can just read Dad’s mind. He’s begrudgingly giving Simon a +1 for the handshake. Dad leads Simon over to the grandstands motioning Mom and me to occupy ourselves elsewhere.

Half an hour later, I go to retrieve Simon from the clutches of my father. Dad pulls me aside before we can make our escape.

“Well, Wog, you seem to have a nice boyfriend here.”

I am blown away. Where is the “never see him again” speech? I’m walking away with Simon, who is about to fall over, due to weakness in his knees, and I hear Dad call out.

“By the way, this is the guy I tried to get you to talk to last year!”

AAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGHHHHHH!! How could this have happened?! All that prep work! I now remember Dad telling me about a boy he met at the fair last year, but his name was Paul. Or was it?

Well, my life has taken a good turn, for a while, anyway. I mean, my parents aren’t just going to suddenly wise up and learn how to use a laptop are they? They are not going to take Simon and me anywhere where there are soft, dark, warm places with no parents, cops or nuns in sight, are they? But for now, I think I can handle their Talks, their questions and making me use the dictionary. I think I can handle it.

Where is that cyanide?