My kitchen is covered in egg.

I've been learning a lot lately. Honestly, I don't know what school is for. Today I learned why it isn't a good idea to fry eggs in olive oil. Yesterday I learned that it isn't a good idea to automatically assume that your piano teacher will expect that you have been learning the third movement of the new sonata. (They tend to begin with the first.) I've learned that it isn't a good idea to bike while carrying nine hardcover books in a backpack, and I've learned all about bad ideas concerning drugs (seriously, if only Keith Moon had been to therapy or something). I have learned that there is no better way to wake up than to the sound of rain pounding on the ceiling. (Yes, the ceiling, considering where I live.) I have learned that there's really no point in worrying about the future. I have learned that elephants are awesome.

Using the word "awesome" as the deft transition between paragraphs, my guitar is pretty awesome. I'm infatuated with her. I've named her Ambrosine.

Okay, I'm tired and currently unmotivated, so it's time for yet another round of stuff I found on my computer. I don't know how I manage to stumble across so many things that I've forgotten about. This is completely different from the last one, and although it's fairly old, no one aside from me has seen it before. I hope. It's a little unusual, not only because I don't usually write in the first person, but also because it draws a little more on my own experiences than I feel comfortable about. It was an experiment.

They always told us that we could do anything. As if that made it true, as if we were equally gifted and would all be offered equal opportunities. Perfect honesty has never been perceived as the best method for raising children. The idea, of course, is to shelter them from the brutal truth of the futility of their existence, pacify them with fantasy. Adolescence is the hellish repercussion.

In the ninth grade, our guidance counsellor distributed questionnaires among the classes. These were designed to uncover each student’s ideal profession, and were full of questions such as Do you enjoy working with children? Would you be interested in a career involving travelling? Do you want to work outdoors? The guidance counsellor was tall, and the smell of his clothes reminded me vaguely of the shoehorns my father kept in his closet when I was a little girl, which looked like ducks if you turned them the right way.

I was only ever called into his office once, when a teacher was given cause to believe that I was suffering from depression. He asked me if I had been contemplating suicide, and I told him I hadn't been. He made a few notes on a small white paper with a blue pen and a businesslike manner, and we never spoke again.

My questionnaire advised me to consider work as an anaesthesiologist, but I didn’t go into science when I left my high school, so I never found out if I would have been a good anaesthesiologist. I could never bring myself to put much faith in the accuracy of the analysis. An anaesthesiologist kills a patient for a little while and then brings them back, and I think that the best anaesthesiologist would be someone who was able to make the patient feel perfectly at ease with that idea. I can’t imagine anyone being at ease with their life in my hands.

Sparkles.