My Diet Dr Pepper is talking to me. It's so carbonated I can hear it bubbling from three feet away. It's like Rice Krispies in soda form.

I was at Valentino's (pizza chain, for all you non-Midwesterners) yesterday, and the man in the booth behind me ordered "sodapop." He didn't specify a kind, he just wanted "sodapop." The waiter had to rattle off the entire drink list before the man decided on Pepsi. My immediate thought was that the man might be mentally disabled, so I surreptitiously turned around and checked. He wasn't. He was just a bald man in his early 50s who wanted a sodapop.

When I was a sophomore, my business teacher used to refer to mentally handicapped people as "mentally challenged." He did it all the time; we were studying the Americans with Disabilities Act, so he had plenty of opportunities. Finally, I had to raise my hand and point out, "They're not 'mentally challenged.' That's like saying a guy with no legs is 'physically challenged.' I'd be physically challenged if I ran a marathon; I am 'mentally challenged' when I take a test or do a crossword puzzle. Someone with Down's Syndrome is mentally handicapped."

I'm not sure why I shared that little anecdote. It just seemed to make sense at the time. Oh--the sodapop guy; that's what I was talking about.

[I deleted this paragraph before posting. It was originally a story about the waiter we had (Kevin) and how much he made fun of me for not getting my money's worth at the buffet. I reread it, and I decided it was too boring. You're not missing much.]

Dad and I went to the library today, and I came home armed with American Poetry and Prose and Choosing the Right College. We had an argument about where the Clash line "All the animals come out at night" comes from; he thought it was Ginsberg, I fought on the side of Taxi Driver. I win.

It looks like Cummings is still going to prevail on the poetry project front; I'll probably use either "the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls" or "'next to of course god america i." Now I've just got to buckle down and actually do the thing.

My grandfather has decided that I should go to Harvard. I have decided to begin failing all my classes and to bomb the SAT in order to avoid such a fate. I don't know how he got this in his head; he didn't even apply to Harvard because he was irritated that they charged an application fee. He went to Georgetown instead.

I have these visions of Harvard being this place where everyone talks about "caviah and Kennedys." Oops...I mean Havahd. It's kind of like my theory that at Brown, the only thing anybody ever says is, "Dude...hands are so fucking weird...I'm a semiotics major...hey, don't we have a protest to go to?" And at Columbia, everybody talks about Dickinson, Gloria Steinem, and the Evils of Men. Wait, no, that's my vision of Bryn Mawr. My vision of Columbia is Julia Stiles. I'm reasonably certain that she's the only student there.

Down with real college. I'm going to go to mime school.

Did Marcel Marceau have any siblings? If so, I bet they hated him when they were all little kids. He was probably really good at the Quiet Game.