VHS day

Natalie got into Yale. Hooray!

It has been a long haul. She has always been an exceptional girl, then young lady, and we knew she would do well, but because she has no patents or start-ups under her belt, something like this was no shoe-in. She did the leg work, and it happened.

So via John and Hank Green, she had turned me onto the Mountain Goats, which until then had been one of those Durham bands that I didn't have time to pay attention to. But I started listening to some of their stuff and watching the videos on YouTube, and came across this one.

And I was listening to it yesterday evening, after she had told me she got in, and I just started crying, and I think the reason is this: for me, high school was war, and Yale was victory. It was a rear-guard war, to be sure, making up for the earlier years when I had buck teeth, was scrawny as fuck and, yes, people were mean to me. I don't think I was a nasty warrior, unless you were a forward trying to bring the ball down my wing and I wasn't able to cleanly out accelerate you and take the ball when you lost control of your dribble. If I had to take you down, you knew it was war. Other than that, it was all pretty civilized.

But make no mistake, at some very basic level, it was war.

To the best of my knowledge, Natalie didn't have to put up with that much after an initial mean girl episode back in 6th grade, the moment she pivoted away from a set of girls who would go on to become "popular," when she took up with another crowd of gentler and geekier ones.

But she worked her ass off, almost always with a smile. And now, like me, she got in early, and can enjoy Christmas and consider whether she wants to apply to other schools.

For me, once the war was over, I took a couple of years of R & R, didn't necessarily utilize the institution as best I might have. Part of me was still fighting, not unlike those Japanese guys on the islands out in the Pacific. Hopefully, she won't have to do that. I don't think she will, and perhaps that is what in the end, was so moving.