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Elliott, reading, “ Name: SweetJordana; Most Ideal Date: Tarring and Feathering; Last Book Read:
2001 Contact-Free Ways to Drive a Man Wild.’
”
    “Number one: read these ads to them,” Elliott winced.
    “Seriously.” I continued, “ ‘Favorite Food: whipped cream, Favorite Body Part: neck.’ ” I noticed Elliott wasn't paying attention to my reading, but kept glancing over his shoulder where a woman was doing an impromptu lap dance for her boyfriend/date/client/ whatever.
    “Hold on,” he said, “I need to get a better view of this.” He picked up his Barcelona chair and turned his back toward me. The girl squeezed her boobs together in her hands and shoved them in her companion's face, shimmying to the music. Watching Elliott watching her, I wondered what the fuck
I
was doing there, when SweetJordana or someone like her would be much better.

FIVE             
    Don't be a spy.
    —GARRISON KEILLOR, IN HIS ONLINE ADVICE COLUMN TO A WOMAN CONCERNED ABOUT HER FATHERS EXCESSIVE USE OF INTERNET PORN
Perfecting the Art of Mediocrity
    In high school, I didn't have a clue what I wanted to do with my life, beyond getting into college. The guidance counselor maintained a closely guarded book of spectrographs organized by college. The graphs were plotted by combined SAT score, on the
x
-axis, and then GPA on the
y
with admittance represented by red dots, wait lists indicated by black doughnut holes, and rejections by black dots. I couldn't stop thinking about the black dots, and how each one of them was a person, with a disappointed family behind them, and a disappointed world to face after their rejection. To me the black dots’ despair practically dripped off the pages, representing thousands of dollars misspent on SSAT tutoring, flashcards, math camp, private school, karate lessons, and art therapy, all adding up to nothing. I'd sneak into our advisor's office and smuggle the tome back to my desk. I poured over this book, willing myself into a red dot, resolving through pure single-mindedness and daily prayer to the gods of college admission the oneness of myself and that dot.
    When we finally achieved unity, I was at a loss. After the dust had settled, my years in high school seemed like nothing more than the sum of some smudgy purple-inked exegesis in my yearbook. Graduation left a smoky impression of white linen and country club luncheons. I was caught by dread. I had given so little thought to what I actually wanted to do in college that when I received my catalog three weeks after my letter of admission to Brown, I cried. That summer I smoked my first joint, had my first boyfriend, and waited for inspiration to hit me.
    In college, my friends and I practiced insulting each other, making bad art, becoming semioticians, and then, having achieved that to varying degrees, rejecting the whole enterprise to embrace a new kind of studied anti-intellectualism. White boys called each other nigga. My girlfriends and I took pride in looking trashy. We also built bongs, and I picked up dirty colloquialisms like “poon-tang” and “felching.”
    My college boyfriend, Ben, was a tall, brooding boy I met the first week of school after my roommate, Sarah, took him home with her. It took us two years to fall in love, and then we were inseparable, united by our mutual dependence and our desire to at once eschew the world because “everybody else sucks” and yet still not be disliked by anybody.
    I created and discarded many selves. By senior year I applied my skills of clue-gathering to becoming a tamer of unwieldy texts. I wrote a pretentious thesis that strongly favored style over substance, fancying myself the intellectual equivalent of a streetwiseScotland Yarder—fearlessly willing to bring together elements other people saw as impossible, repulsive, and absurd. One of my advisors wrote in my evaluation that she was “suspicious” of a paper that I wrote so well about “terrible literature.” By the