• What I learned after the McCormick Semiformal, '99.
• What I learned after the Senior Ball, '99.
• What I learned about the intelligence of my friends.

I also like to write fiction, although I have an unfortunate tendency to write 1000+ words of a story before being distracted by other story ideas. Thus, I have a vast library of unfinished stories, dropped in various stages of ugly incompleteness. I have finished a few stories, though - here are a few, listed in chronological order of when they were written. The most recent one listed here (about a flood, written in the fall of '99) sucks; the others increasingly suck, in reverse chronological order.

• Untitled (Lucifer) - The first assignment in my first fiction-writing class was to pick a person and to describe him. Most students picked parents, siblings, friends. . . and then there was me.
• Cut-Off - I won fifty bucks for this one in a MIT writing competition. When I read this story afterwards, though, I honestly couldn't figure out why I won anything at all.
• Masquerade - I always got the feeling that this story was very, very generic. But I had to turn something in for class, and this was all that popped out. This story also has the distinction of being the last truly psychotic story I wrote.
• Looking Above - This story can be summed up in one word: Cheese. Thick, gooey, stringy, stretchy cheese. I wrote it because I was sitting up one night, trying to think of something to turn in for the next day - and I couldn't. After a while, my lack of ideas started to really piss me off - and so I just rattled some crap off onto the paper, making it as overwraught and overdone as possible. Well, some people in class liked it. . . sorta. . .
• Untitled (Swing) - This is the first story listed here that I didn't write specifically for a class - I wrote it for a person instead. It has something to do with swing. Oh, and someone told me that the story has an excessive number of paragraph breaks. I think he's right, but I'll fix it some other time.
• Untitled (Flood) - My mom called me up one day and told me about this news story she had heard: apparently, there had been a flood somewhere in New Jersey. In a certain town, everybody had survived, except for an old woman and her son, who had stayed in their home - no one was sure why.

  Well, my mom's story disturbed me - disturbed me a lot. I wrote my own explanation, and then sent it to my mom for her birthday.

• The Billboard - I started this story a short while before I graduated from college, and finally finished it (sort of) almost three years later. Writing the beginning was as easy as falling, writing the rest - well, it reminded me a lot of constipation. Oh well.