all of you, too many of you, have misplaced confidence in me. i am not good. no, of course i'm not stupid, i don't mean that, and of course i do think i am *some* good. but i'm way too temperamental and inconsistent to be seriously good. people think i'll always be able to pull off something last minute. just because i usually do doesn't mean i will now. i am less unhappy about the thought that i am in serious trouble than that everyone assumes i'll be okay while i am falling all the time. i do wish people would worry about me a bit more, and not simply think that well, she has an unusual ability for creating ruinous situations but an equal one for pulling out of them. and no, i'm not going on just about this paper, i mean in general.

look at me: i'm not hardworking, and i have no discipline, and i'm not even some nohrnbergian genius or even yen to do without all that. not enough ambition either, which sometimes seems to me to be more necessary than just being good; i have this switch in me that sometimes make me goes, ah who cares? i have told people this story many times but in sec 1, i was trying out for the house track team, and making good time, and only one more round to go, and then something in me said, who cares, why do you want to be on the team so much? so i stopped, right there on the track, and walked back.the track captain, i think her name was eliza teo, thought i must have been ill. that's what i mean - i don't *want* anything bad enough. i remember now: minyin gave me a coffee mug once with the message: you could do great things but you would rather hang around munching carrots. tea, chocolate, book, bedcovers, happiness. plus i'm too much swayed by my moods, and subject to panicking and procrastination. and capable of turning in a blank exam, giving up easily. honestly i don't know how i got this far in life. i've got every inappropriate sort of habit and mentality to survive school. you know how they always say in books: "you'll never amount to anything!" well i feel exactly like that about the future. i don't think i belong in grad school, and maybe i don't care. i want to be near a university, to have access to library and teachers, but i can't write papers, always knew that. the only thing i *can* write is "wormhole writing" (i love that nohrnbergism). and i want to do that. read and think and write. does that make any sense? although of course that's what everyone else thinks they want to do too and how many of us can? i'm hardly unique in that - nohrnberg said that most professors want to be writers. it's a gamble he said. it's safer to be make literature comprehensible to others than to produce it ourselves, and it's up to all of us which we'd rather be. i know which i'd rather be; i don't know which i'll turn out to be. i have seen those black-bound theses in the bottom of alderman. how many of those people are happy published and truly good? shades, all of them. i am not in a very cheery mood am i? should shut up.