April Is the Soberest Month

That's the idea, anyway. No alcohol all month, and no dining out. Exceptions will be made (a) if M. throws a tax-themed party around tax day, which is possible, and (b) if someone offers to take us to a fine dinner, which we could never refuse in good conscience. If all goes as planned, we will end the month slimmer, healthier, and with many extra dollars in our bank accounts.

Last weekend I was looking for jeans at a thrift store and a girl approached me. She was a hair stylist at a posh salon, and asked me to be a model for a "hair show" previewing this season's new cuts. Or something. I'm not sure if I should do it; on the one hand, it's a free fancy haircut; on the other hand, I'd have to strut around on a stage and make a fool of myself, probably trip, fall, etc. And everyone I know (admittedly, only a handful of souls) would make fun of me for being a hair model. Probably for the rest of my life.

I scanned the New York Times headlines one day last week and noticed that one of the op-eds was written by someone I know. Someone whom I'd almost, but not quite, label a friend. We used to talk frequently in the last year before college graduation. We played dozens of games of pool, laughed at Craigslist posts, and devised a rather mean-spirited Craigslist experiment involving a false identity and the "Casual Encounters" section. (I blogged about it afterwards, in fact, but that blog is long gone.) When graduation approached and I hadn't yet found a job, he offered to help find me one. But then I found this job, he moved east, and I haven't talked to him since. It was kind of surprising to see him on the op-ed page--but not that surprising.

I told Zoe about it on our fortnightly yuppie lunch date. "We went to a top school. We're going to be seeing stuff like that more and more often as we get older," she said. Indeed, I can already imagine my classmates in government, on the Supreme Court, as public intellectuals, as Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and Nobel laureates. They're well on their way. They're in Harvard Law and the Kennedy School and the Brookings Institution; they're working for Senators; some, like M., are getting phds in the sciences and will go on to cure Alzheimer's or write algorithms that revolutionize computing. Meanwhile I am in this floodlit box, blogging about how I am in this floodlit box. But most importantly, I may be a hair model, how exciting! My education is, like, totally paying off.

Here is my advice to past-me, who, regrettably, will not be reading this anytime soon:

Take calculus in high school. Don't make that idiotic pledge to avoid college math at all costs. Don't muck around in archaeology and romance languages and "poetics" and "observational astronomy"; and, by God, find a job outside of the library's media basement. Do research. Don't worry too much about specializing, much less finding a "calling," just yet, but take rigorous classes and pick up real skills. Don't be a dabbler in the arts when you don't intend to be an artist. Don't maintain a long-term, long-distance relationship with a demanding boyfriend who won't tolerate your finding summer jobs in other cities, and whom, it turns out, you aren't so crazy about, anyway.

And, as for present/future-me:

Quit being a social-anxiety poster child and do things. Sometimes this will involve talking to people, and it will be awful. Suck it up. Moreover, you will have to stop reading The Economist cover-to-cover every week, and instead read things that seem--at least at the outset--less fun. Textbooks on statistics or econometrics, for example. And statistical-software primers. At home, instead of following the minutiae of the moment's political debates (these are my soap operas, my sports-fandom), you should enter data onto Excel spreadsheets. In theory, you and your boyfriend will soon use these for independent research. The articles, when they are published, will be your Silver Bullet; the best schools will compete for your talents and you will live happily ever after. (I don't really believe that, but a publication or two certainly can't hurt.)

Anyway.

Restaurant pictures are forthcoming.