snot-nosed kid

Priscilla, Joseph Szabo

i've just returned home from a couple of much needed hours of basking in the sun in central park and progressing faithfully in the monstrous book i'm reading. for some reason, i got to thinking about my hair--about how long it is, longer than it's ever been so far as i can remember. maybe i have hair on the brain (the rock musical that i absolutely adore) because it opens tomorrow night at the delacorte in central park! anyway, my thought process about hair got me thinking about how i used to cut my own hair for the longest time. i was a snotty nosed teenager. this got me to think about my silly senior portrait, one day that i actually remember getting my hair done. i don't remember what they did to it--cut it? blow it out? either way, my hair is the least memorable aspect of my senior portrait. what is memorable is that i am wearing a green army jacket (yep, a la freaks and geeks), my mouth is agape (i was laughing instead of posing), and i am definitely not looking at the camera. if that's not snotty enough, then the senior quote i have stamped right below my name is. i chose a pretty perfect jack kerouac quote that, of course, was butchered by the yearbook editors. well, not butchered per se, but they cut out the last line, which turned my purely optimistic and sincere senior quote into a snotty-faced goodbye to go hand in hand with my photo. here it is.

what they printed:

What is the feeling when you're driving away from people, and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing?--it's the too huge world vaulting us, and it's good-bye.

and what they left off:

But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.