ooohhhhh. now i get it.

i just sent an email to a student in the tenor that i often got feedback as a child, adolescent and young adult, namely:  you are way too smart to be getting this kind of grade/acting like this/blowing off something so important.  i don't necessarily relate to this student, with whom i have little in common besides gender.  but i do, very deeply, understand that in college and young adulthood, you've got excesses of energy that feel as though they must be devoted to intense experimentation: with identities, practices, sociabilities, substances, etc.  if you are in fact smart and outgoing and seeing the world with brand new perspectives (which i was and i guess she is, so maybe we have more in common than i thought), hoo boy, it's all you can do to keep from blowing a gasket.  eros galore, and i mean in the freudian sense, of looking to join, join, join, partake, partake, partake.  and now here i am all old and knowing that the fact that i never had to pay a permanent setbacking price for all of that is really a matter of luck more than anything else, and here i am knowing that not everyone can depend on that kind of luck, and here i am sending that kind of email.  youth is wasted on the young, etc., etc., etc., forever and ever, amen.