All persons chronically diseased are egotists, whether the disease be of the mind or body; whether it be sin, sorrow, or merely the more tolerable calamity of some endless pain, or mischief among the cords of mortal life. Such individuals are made acutely conscious of a self, by the torture in which it dwells. Self, therefore, grows to be so prominent an object with them that they cannot but present it to the face of every casual passer-by. There is a pleasure--perhaps the greatest of which the sufferer is susceptible--in displaying the wasted or ulcerated limb, or the cancer in the breast; and the fouler the crime, with so much the more difficulty does the perpetrator prevent it from thrusting up its snake-like head to frighten the world; for it is that cancer, or that crime, which constitutes their respective individuality.

Oh, Hawthorne, you hamfisted moralizer! You're right, though.

I'm the worst kind of egotist, I guess, but I sure was sick of seeing that last entry on the rare occasions when I visit this page. Problem solved (this time without obliteration).

News: I was half-wrong about The Girl (to her favor), but all judgements of right and wrong are reduced to a uniform meaninglessness by the stark levelling hand of fate. I was not accepted to either of the Ohio-schools I applied to for the Spring. Never mind the near-perfect college record, the great high-school grades and SAT scores, magnificent and mature essays, and (frankly) effusive recommendations of highly regarded professors. "No room." Really, come on -- how many professors write that they've never had a student in so-and-so's intellectual range before, or one who is so comfortable in so many disparate disciplines, and might earn a doctorate in any of them? I sat in on classes at the schools and, really, these kids weren't stupid, but like the students at my current community college, most of them were nothing special. Most were harder workers than great thinkers. Not that I'm a "great thinker," but anyway.

I'll apply to the schools anew for the Fall (as well as to several others, my faith in myself being now shaken) but, really, as impressive and lovely as the schools are, as happy as I would be if admitted to either of them, as sure as I am that I would make a great and lasting name for myself there, they were more appealing in the Spring because she would be near me. Won't see her then; won't see her in the Summer; then it's off to France, the U.K., and Asia for her. I do not think a young and free heart can stay abond through the long, wasting, grinding years, though the bonds be the sweet silken ones of love. That's the end of that, I guess!

Eight more months, at least, of a nameless backwater community college and low-wage work, sudden despair and solitude: HOT.