Sometimes school seems so fake. It reminds me of a quote I once read about Versailles, the old French court. A man once sadi the following two things. Versailles is a "place where the joys are visible but unreal, and the sorrows are invisible but genuine." He also said that when he left court he would stand in the street to watch a dog gnaw at a bone.

Your social "connections", at least at my prep school, become a trap. Even among friends, there are divisions, people who hate each other yet act like the best of friends. Its like a stage where you have to follow a set of prescribed rules, and if you act out in conflict to these, you are automatically conspired against.

For instance, at my school there is the unfortunate girl who posted an entire sex story [a very embarassing one] on Facebook. It was an accident but that girl now has no friends. She had friends before this, but they have left, unwilling to catch the disease of being a social outcast.

It seems to me as if the priorites at this school are very skewed up. To me, the point of school is to get a good education to go to a good college, make a few loyal friends, perhaps find love, and just in general learn to be an adult. But I am apparently wrong. School is actually about tutoring your friends the wrong answers because they are the competition, having the greatest quantity of "acceptable" friends, steal your best friends boyfriend/girlfreind not becasue you like the guy or girl but because you actually hate your friend, and learn to survive in a cutthroat new world.

Yes. I am serious. People who are supposed to be your friends will offer to tutor you, teach you the wrong things, and then watch as you fail your exams so that they are that much closer to college. I have only a few friends that I would ever ask for help in a subject.

Friends have to be acceptable as well. Your mix of friends must get along, can not be too quirky, and must have the most expensive car and clothes. If they don't you will catch their disease and be labeled unacceptable as well.

If you are angry at your friend, even your best friend who stuck by you through break ups and bad nights, a "good" way to get back at them is to steal their boyfriend. You don't even have to like the guy. You just have to hate your friend enough.

So we lie, cheat and steal. Not my special group of friends. But this is the vipers nest I go to school in.

The way I see it [maybe I'm wrong] you can divide the people in the world inot two groups: the people who look under the rug, who open old closets, who wnat to know, who, to quote a childrens book by Ann Martin "lift the corners of the universe."

Lifting the corners is all about wanting to know, wanting to know everythign, even if its uncomfortable.

I have an ex. Well, you might call him an ex. Hes actually a man who refuses to be caught, a man who does not wnat to be tied down by anyone. Once, I was in love with him. And even though we were wonderful friends and I think he cared for me too, he wanted his freedom.

Thats his choice. But, as my friend, he refused to know how I felt about the situation he had put me in, for yes, he had put me into this in ways I won't detail here. He didn't wnat to know. He wanted to brush it under the rug in the hopes that it would go away, in the hopes that he wouldn't drown in it.

He won't lift the corners of the universe. Now that I know that about him, I like him a lot less. The occasional email, with no real conversation, is the extent of our relationship.

Because he won't lift the corners of the universe.

And I do. I have to.

If I could have lived in any time in history it would have been the Baroque period.

Fashion was at its all time high and it was almost as if anything could happen. We were on the verge of a complete new world, a new age that anyone could be a part of, anyone could join in.

You could stay in Eurpoe and open up a salonm, talking about science, religion, and gossip. You could become an artist, a writer, a musician. You could join a science soceity. You could go to America, for a real new world, if the old world tired you. We were learning so much in leaps and bounds that it must have been a very exciting time period.

Even women were gaining more and more power, even if it was all behind closed doors.