Figuring it out

Graham and I spent a lot of time together yesterday. He came back to the house to take a bunch of comic books that had been mine since childhood which granny had saved thinking they would be valuable. In the end he got a disappointingly small amount of money for them, but he got them out of the house and he learned a valuable lesson about selling old stuff and markets in general: if you think something might be valuable, other people might be thinking the same thing, so the value might be less than you expect. And you might underestimate the transaction costs involved in distributing them. Mostly it was granny's error in this case, but he got to learn from it. 

Thankfully, all the old comic books are out of the house.

More importantly, it turns out that Graham is scrambling a little bit socially right now. One problem is he doesn't drink or smoke weed, which is in the long term a good thing but in the short term it puts him a little outside the mainstream. Another is that his roommate Sam, with whom he eats a lot of meals, is going home on weekends to keep his mom company because she is alone in the US. His dad stayed in Korea while Sam came to the US to get educated. Per Graham "she doesn't even have any pets." Which means Graham is alone on weekends. And then there's his autism.

Naturally my brain is in overdrive thinking of ways to try to remedy the situation. I should connect him with Niklaus's daughter Annabel (whom he knows already) or Eric and Charlotte's boy Kai or Susannah's little brother Eli (whom he also knows kinda) who rooms with Beverly and Amos's boy Will (whom he may know). None of them will be his besties but just multiplying the number of familiar faces he might see around campus is better than nothing.

In time things will work out but the early days of college can be hard. I am reminded of how Natalie, ever the intrepid trooper, broke down in sobs when Mary and I were leaving at the end of Family Weekend her freshman year. Things got better. 

Then COVID came and fucked with her college experience royally. Hopefully we won't have another global pandemic.