• Location: 85704
• Mood: peroxide and toothpaste
• Music: a pleasantly insistent memory of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah

The Care of the Self

Once I'd gotten over my Whitney Houston crush and, thanks to the better part of a summer in the Rhode Island School of Design's "Pre-College" program, realized that my classmates at Queen Anne School were hopelessly unhip and therefore had nothing on me, I returned for my senior year with a newfound sense of purpose. I'd already lost a lot of weight at RISD, thanks to the abysmal cafeteria food and the misery of solitude, but amped up my makeover by taking lots of No-Doz and jogging nightly.

That plan would eventually catch up with me, leading to a January of what my father referred to as "malingering." In the meantime, though, I slimmed down like a fashion model on crack and then managed to crack a bone in my foot:

I was even dying my hair, for some strange reason. Yesterday I was contacted by a magazine I'm writing for about providing a credit for an author photo. It hadn't occurred to me that they'd think someone other than me was responsible for the shots I sent them. Why would anyone take a picture of me?

It was a pleasure, then, to discover the scratched and severely faded Konica negative of this photo in my archives last night, because it proves that, yes, someone did photograph me for some extra-familial purpose. That person would have been Henry, later my freshman-year flatmate in Berkeley and still later the person whom I periodically met at the Bear's Lair to discuss the merits of the Grateful Dead, proving that I had, once and for all, become as post-innocent as I'd felt before I'd lost my innocence.