This is my fortune for today

Dissed!

That's all I can conclude.

My fortune reads: "Your senior years will be happy and fulfilling."

Well, I've already had several senior years, so let's go through them one-by-one, shall we:


1. Senior year of nursery school: This was in 1981. In this case, senior year was #2 out of 2. The school in question (Temple Emmanuel Nursery School) was more like day care (before day care was overly prevalent), and was associated with my family synagogues. Was it fulfilling? Well, I already had some practice stalking people by the time it was over (well, it would be more accurate to say I had practice listening in on the conversations of other children when they didn't know I was around...children are so naive; there was no literal stocking involved), and I did a damn fine job lip-synching when they made us sing religious songs. And I was the only one in my class who could read and count. They even had a graduation ceremony with paper diplomas. The Dodgers would go on to win the World Series in 1981, and that year of baseball was a big part of what cemented me as a lifelong fan. So I guess that senior year was pretty good.

2. Senior year of elementary school: This was in 1990. I graduated from Hawthorne School (in the Beverly Hills Unified School District). Our district doesn't have a junior high. I was 14 when I graduated. How good could the year have possibly been. Plus, the 80s ended. Our civilization could only go downhill from there. Given that New Kids on the Block were tearing up the charts at the time, I suspect I knew it, too. On the (very!) bright side, the album Violator came out in 1990, so the my senior year of elementary school was also when I truly discovered Depeche Mode. (I liked a lot of their songs a lot before, but I didn't realize they were all by the same group and that that was the group.) I've been hooked ever since.

3. Senior year of high school: The year was 1994. I graduated from Beverly High. Well, graduation meant good things---like going to college and leaving home. (I didn't know at the time that Caltech would tell me to bend over because I still thought I was hot shit. That reminds me: Did I ever tell you about the title of the complex analysis book I want to write: Complex Analysis: How to Compute Contour Integrals Without Bending Over.) I won some academic awards that made me happy at the time (soon, they wouldn't make any difference because everybody else at Caltech got that stuff too). I'm sure there were other things worth mentioning. It was a fairly blah senior year.

4. Senior year at Tech: Now we come to 1998. It was very stressful at times (with all the stuff that was constantly thrown at me and all the work I had to do), but I hung out with great friends, learned a lot of stuff, and had a lot of fun (though also stressful) with my Ditch Day stack, which turned out really well (only one thing didn't work, and that was because we had to rush it). Despite all the stress, I would say I enjoyed my senior year of Tech more than all the others.

5.Senior year of grad school: This was 2002. This isn't typically counted, but what the Hell. I spent the year writing my thesis and then rewriting my thesis. My thesis exam was horrendous, and I was really sick of Ithaca and not all that pleasant to be around that year due to how I was reacting to all the stress. Plus, I didn't really have the friendship network to relieve me of my stress the way I did at Tech. (As a result, my reaction to what may have actually been slightly less stress was far worse.) Anyway, this one definitely sucked.


Now, today's fortune was really about the future rather than the past. While I'm glad it predicts I'll be "busy" (so to speak) when I'm old, I still feel that I've been horribly dissed and mangled.