Negative:  I’ve just learned that I have a 15 page paper due tomorrow.  I thought the 10 page paper that I handed in this morning was my final paper.  My teacher gave me the surprise of my life when he asked me if I wanted to meet for the draft of the final paper right after I handed in the 10 page paper.  Well.  Off to cut my wrists the correct way (vertically).

Positive: I’ve always thought that my friend MP always just kind of thought of me as someone okay to talk to, someone to bitch to, to complain to, to mutually hate on our school dean to–but surprisingly enough, she must think of me as a friend.  She’s going back home to the-land-of-whatever tonight and before she went she dropped off a nice little box to me.  She had bought me a skirt from deLias. ...

At some point, at some place, womankind developed its incredible susceptibility to being offended by anything and everything, insignificant and not.  I lack this gene, but my peers do not.  It makes for a very poor set of social skills.

“I ought not to have listened to her,” he confided to me one day.

“One never ought to listen to the flowers. One should simply look at them and breathe their fragrance. Mine perfumed all my planet. But I did not know how to take pleasure in all her grace. This tale of claws, which disturbed me so much, should only have filled my heart with tenderness and pity.”

And he continued his confidences: “The fact is that I did not know how to understand anything! I ought to have judged by deeds and not by words. She cast her fragrance and her radiance over me. I ought never to have run away from her… I ought to have guessed all the affection that lay behind her poor little strategems....