pass me a barrel and a paper bag

Girlfriend, right now, is plodding through a stack of essays, stories, cartoons, and assorted literary tidbits from my high school days. What's mostly leading to her amusement makes me think of other things:

1. I had such neat handwriting!

2. I was a bad--no, atrocious--writer in high school, not because I couldn't parse a sentence or pick through a thesaurus, but because I didn't have any real sense of the language--no feel for verbs, no intimacy with nouns. I was all adjectives and adverbs.

3. My students, bless their hearts, will improve, long after their days in my class have drifted away from their memories like dandelion seeds a-blowin' in the wind.

Maybe I'll post some of my old poems. And whatever other humiliating things I can dredge up.