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    ####  ###                       "J.E."                         ###       
     #######                      by Jason                                   
      ####                                                                  

 April 17, 26 J.E.

        Believe it or not, I actually went and got a life this past weekend.
 My brother's female friend whom I had hung out with a couple of times before
 (you know, the bisexual communist) invited me to join her and a bunch of
 friends for a birthday party.  It was better than what I had already planned
 for that weekend, which involved some pliers, peanut butter, a squirrel, and
 a petrified circus midget.

        Unlike the last time I went to visit, this time I didn't have a
 blowout on the highway, so it was already going better.

        So I arrived at her apartment, and was the second one to arrive. The
 guy who was already there was pretty cool, except that he was a Philosophy
 major.  Now I don't know about you, but that was one of those majors I've
 always made fun of as future assistant managers of McDonald's.  Still, he
 was a pretty cool guy.

        Next came a chick who was studying to be a drug and alcohol
 counselor.  I guess that's a reasonable profession.  I mean, my evil
 cowhead MOM is one, so how bad can they be?  She was also a lesbian, which
 also isn't a bad thing, but it still puts her on the Somewhat Unusual
 section in the library of my mind.

        Then came the other ones.  A History major.  An Art major.  A Music
 major.  An Undecided-After-Two-Years major.  It slowly dawned on me that I,
 God help me, was the most normal, average person in the room!  Certainly I
 was the only one who will be making more than $30,000 a year at some point
 in my life.  I can only imagine how alien and strange I appeared to them, a
 pragmatic, kill-'em-all-let-God-sort-'em-out realist in their land of
 flowers and butterflies.  I was the blackest sheep in a room full of black
 sheep.

        I am certainly no stranger to off-the-wall weirdness, as you may have
 gathered if you've read ANYTHING else my eager mind hath wrought, but common
 sense is my compass.  In college, I hung out with all the engineering,
 science, and computer major dudes who happened to dabble into various arts.
 They were weird, certainly, but at the end of the day, they had very
 practical aims of contributing something solid to society.

        So there I was, Mister MBA among liberal arts students.  I might as
 well have been naked and painted blue.  Still, though, they all seemed
 perfectly cool and decent folk, and we did have some significant common
 ground and interests.  In other words, when I become dictator for life of
 the North American Economic Bloc, I probably won't go out of my way to have
 them liquidated.

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 # (c)2000 aNAda e'zine                              aNAda062 .*.  by Jason #
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