After finishing at the CT Thursday morning I got straight to work on the take-home final for Art and Politics. (That's as good a description of it as any. There was typing and printing involved, but I can't call it a paper because none of the usual rules of introductions or citing work or anything applied.) I had breakfast before going to class on time and handing it in, and was constantly on the edge of nodding off through the whole class. (You'll notice that "sleep" does not appear in that narrative.)

I went to the Freedom and the First Amendment midterm with a cup of coffee in my hand and a chocolate muffin in my stomach. I think I did pretty good on that exam. Unless I really screwed up and confused one court case for another, I got all the questions correct in their broad outline.

It was sort of funny there at the end. With about half an hour left my coffee ran out. So even though there was still plenty of time left for the small amount of work I had left, I suddenly had a time limit - finish while I was still lucid enough to write on the blue book rather than the desk. I got almost 12 hours of sleep last night, happily.

Yesterday was pretty funny all around. I was cracking up all day long about the CT news story about former policeman Peter Christ's talk about the War on Drugs. It was titled "Christ speaks on drugs." Classic, that. And early in the morning I stopped by the post office for the first time in over a week and I found a letter in my box addressed to

PROF C LEVESQUE
PSYCHOLOGY DEPARTMENT
UNIV OF ROCHESTER
ROCHESTER, NY 14627

So it appears I'm now a psychology professor. Cool.

Seriously though, there's a story there. Waaay back in high school there was this girl named Carissa who I - well, I guess I should say had a crush on, but she never returned the feelings. For a long time, "I like you as a friend" was the single most offensive phrase I could imagine. The last time I talked to her was the summer between my year in France and my freshman year of college. Her daughter Chantal was almost six months old at the time. When I got to college I was sort of depressed for a couple reasons, and the fact that things had never gone anywhere with Carissa was high on that list.

So one day in September or October 2001 I'm looking through the bookstore for some textbook, and something catches my eye. I notice a tag under a set of textbooks with the name "Levesque" on them. Amazed, I do a little research. It turns out that that year, there was a psychology professor here from somewhere in Quebec. Her name was Chantal. Chantal Levesque.

That didn't help my mood.

And so yesterday I got this bit of mail (it turned out to be just some junk mail) meant for her. And I was laughing at it. Sure, Carissa never cared about me "in that way" blah blah blah, but I got over that years ago. But it was just so amazing to get, in the middle of my last semester, this echo of my first few weeks here. And just to double that effect, I'm in a class with Kevin, my freshman roommate, and it looks like we might wind up working on a group project together.

Full circle. Closure. Bookends on the past four years. Getting back to my roots, as Kim Healey put it. Real life almost never works out so neatly. An ideal way to look back and reflect on what I have done with myself during my college career. I'm still the same person at heart, but at the same time I've changed.