just like the breadsticks

i tried to quit law school, but i forgot about the manacles. it's hard to snap those off, even with a running start. hard on the wrists, too, let me tell you. ouch.

it's funny how fast things come back to you. take the olive garden, for instance. man. the salad? the breadsticks? they both taste the same, after two three seven years. the whiskey still comes watered-down, you'll be happy to know, and they still have the sausage soup. excuse me, "zuppa." and the water still tastes a little like paper towels. or maybe a freshly-flushed toilet (or the paper towels used to soak up the water post-overflowed toilet? yes. there we go).

but i mean that to talk about other things (you know, i do that. yes, still, after however many days or weeks it's been since we've last talked, you and i, flush out the real thing with a joke, just to get you going so i can sneak in the point while you're still laughing, and don't think it doesn't work, because it does) going so fast, like this law school i tried to run away from about a thousand times a day the first year, and then a hundred times the second, and now i'm scared for it to end because when things end for me, they end, and you know i don't like to go back, you know how that goes. i'm sad for this time to end, i said, and i mean it even! all those little mentees that ask me about this or that--never, "what do you think about things?" but always "what is this fact, tell me this fact," like there's no way something is just my opinion, because i know the truth and the answer and i will tell it to you if you just ask--all those tutorees, and those professors, and how this or that or the other goes. all that will be lost with the reception of a piece of paper bigger than any other i've gotten before, and with my name on it (the full one, even), and a hood that's not much of a hood, and a silly robe and the puffy hat, and then the coming of the three-day test of anything and everything i crammed into and pulled out of my head in the past three years. i'd rather keep the one and hold stay the other.

but, well now. it's Christmas, isn't it? so soon! and with that comes the probably last just-like-old-times, with the going shopping on Christmas Eve (the twenty-third if we're lucky), the playing of games and the frustrations and the very fun late hours, and all the rest of it (including a lot of snow on my coat). so that'll be another ending, or feel like it, but go so fast and so light it'll barely get noticed, and with that i guess i should say: is it any wonder, ohio, i'm leaving you? soon and even sooner. watch for me as i go by lest you miss me.

but who am i kidding? i'll come back to you so fast.