ECCHHHH!!!!! Hot and humid and sticky and just ICKY out there! WhatEVER possessed my father to retire to Arizona and drag me and my mother to this dump?
Truly: I hate Arizona. If I could afford to move someplace else…well…you may be sure I’d be someplace else.
We’re here because of (un)lovely Sun City. When the old man and my mother found that place, they were beside their workin’-class selves with joy: CHEAP and NO KIDS.
Yeah. They didn’t like children — abominated the sound of kids playing outside — and they were inveterate penny-pinchers.
I was still in high school: you couldn’t live in Sun City with your kids unless they were sent off to college. So to get themselves into that ghetto for old folks, they applied to the University of Arizona, saying I was sooooooo bright I should be admitted a year early. And…forgodsake! The goddamn university accepted me!
Yeah: a year early.
So I missed my senior year in my Southern California high school. Lost all my friends. And landed in Tucson with no friends and no credible preparation for a university curriculum. Totally uninformed, I majored in French — for no other reason than that I was fluent in French and could get straight A’s in the courses just by showing up in class and snoozing through each session.
Understand: I wanted to major in astrophysics or in microbiology… In those days neither field was especially welcoming to women. Add to that the lack of a senior year in high school — no calculus, no fourth-year language, no final science course — and a major in anything that wasn’t “girlie” was pretty much out of the question.
Yeah. I ended up majoring in French. Why? Because I was fluent in it and didn’t have to put out a fraction of an erg of energy to get A’s in every course I stumbled into.
After that — with a Phi Beta Kappa key and an unsaleable major — I ended up answering the telephones and greeting clients as a receptionist at a law firm.
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Ohhhh goodie. WordPress is doing something weird here. Don’t see how to fix it.
Let us circumvent the frustration factor and bring this post to an end.
Weird!!!!