If you think I'm annoying and preachy now, you should have known me in grade school.

But that's one lifetime." Yeah." But while doing that one I'd want to be able to have done other stuff. Whole other lives- the one where I sail-" I know, on a boat you made yourself.

We are the bright new stars born of a screaming black hole, the nascent suns burst from the darkness, from the grasping void of space that folds and swallows--a darkness that would devour anyone not as strong as we. We are oddities, sideshows, talk show subjects. We capture everyone's imagination.

Having lost people when they were young, you feel intimately acquainted with mortality, I guess. Though I procrastinate worse than anybody.

And what we were trying to offer every day was one-on-one attention. The goal was to have a one-to-one ratio with every one of these students.

A combination of acting, lying, begging, and cheating.

We have advantages. We have a cushion to fall back on. This is abundance. A luxury of place and time. Something rare and wonderful. It's almost historically unprecedented. We must do extraordinary things. We have to. It would be absurd not to.