The Afterward

When I started this blog I knew that Harford 3C would not last forever, but I had every intention of keeping this blog going for as long as possible and keeping up with the 3C girls even after the time came for us to separate. But, as I have not even been able to keep up with this blog for the entirety of our time in 3C (due mostly to me losing interest in reality), I have decided to end this blog. I was going to delete it, but the suitemates objected. So, here is one last entry. It's what will probably happen to us all after we leave 3C next week. I'm writing it in the past tense because afterwards are always in the past tense.


After living with English majors for a year, Kendall was tired of the English language all together. She decided to study abroad in Spain for a semester. While studying abroad, Kendall met and fell in love with a man named Pablo, but she refused to date him because he had red hair like hers, and she wanted to be special. She then met another man named Pablo, who had brown hair. He really liked Kendall, but she refused to date him because he had an unusually narrow forehead and it weirded her out. Finally, Kendall met a very attractive blond-haired man. His name was Pablo. Strangely enough, he spoke no Spanish or English, as he had been raised by tangerines. But, Kendall loved this third Pablo (who had nice hair, but not so nice as to be better than hers). They were married at a 24 hour drive-thru wedding chapel by a Spanish speaking man named Raul who they were not entirely sure was qualified to marry people. But, it didn't matter. Kendall and her third Pablo moved to a modestly sized apartment in southern Spain (it strongly resembled the Bat Cave), where they had dance parties every night.

Alisha thought that she had secured a room in WAC's new dorms in which to spend her junior year of college, but when she returned to campus in the fall, the dorms still looked exactly the same as they had looked for many many months. Alisha learned that the construction workers on campus were not actually construction workers, but actors. All this time the loud noises they had been making had only been sound effects. She congratulated the actors on the realism of their noise making, but was distraught to realize that they had not built anything and that she would have to live in a tent in the CAC. That was a tough time for Alisha, but it turned out to all be worth it when she finally achieved universal peace and was put in charge of the whole world.

Laura and Claire stuck together that year after they left 3C, sharing a messy, but quiet room in an all girls dorm. Little did anyone know that they were both leading double lives-- Laura, as a web comic artist, and Claire, as a disco queen. Laura eventually became seriously famous for her artistic skills and exceptional hair. She was invited to display her art all over the world, and became a touring graffiti artist. Claire did not become famous, but she did become very very rich by winning several important disco contests. After one major disco competition, Dominoes hired her as their discoing spokesperson, and Claire never went without pizza again. When she tired of the glamor, she settled down to be a lawyer. Laura too tired of the excitement of being a traveling graffiti artist, and took up writing Biology text books and playing extreme sports.

Erin moved into a suite on the Western Shore with some girls from the basketball team. Erin's new suitemates all dressed alike in matching athletic shorts and t-shirts, and they made fun of Erin for being an awkward, non-athletic English major. Erin wrote an Elm article about being a writer-nerd in a suite full of very tall people. She was the thing that was not like the others-- the Kendall of her Western Shore suite, if you will. Erin started going to basketball games to try to fit in and to be supportive of her suitemates, but she couldn't stop herself from studying the sociology of sports teams. She received honors on the sociological study of Jane Austen's novels she completed for her combined English and Sociology thesis, but she couldn't decide whether she wanted to go to graduate school for Sociology or English. She decided to do both.

Alexis and I moved to an undisclosed off campus location. We refused to tell anyone where we had gone, and, though they wondered, no one ever looked. I planted strawberries and pink Gerbera daisies (which I insisted would grow in neat and orderly rows). Alexis got up very early in the morning to student teach high school math, and we felt like grown ups. I spent the majority of my time writing my thesis on Tom Stoppard and carefully composing short pieces of fiction. Our apartment had no dust, and almost no furniture. We got along nicely, until one day when I tried to fold up Alexis's socks with her in them. She had dealt with having all of her belongings lined up in rows and stacked in piles, with almost falling over every time I tried to square an area rug she was standing on, and even with me alphabetizing her breakfast, but she drew the line at being folded up in her socks.

Since Alexis loved to travel, had always wanted to grow up to be Asian, and was very tall and thin, she moved to Tokyo to become a runway model. In her spare time, she solved several mathematical theorems that had been bothering mathematicians for the past few hundred years, and she wrote an award winning novel about living with someone who vacuums crumbs off of your legs as you're eating bread, has daily asthma attacks during which she gasps, "I'll figure you out some day, Tom Stoppard," just before passing out, occasionally lays on the floor and cries about how she likes the letter B because the top matches the bottom (but she just doesn't like it as a grade because it's not an A), but makes pleasantly refreshing salads.

After Alexis moved to Tokyo, I withdrew from society once and for all, taking up residence in a spacious tree house with wireless internet access, and planting many strawberries, which I ate during the summer. In winter, I hibernated, except on Christmas when I woke up to go sledding and check my e-mail. I befriended a Panda Bear, who I learned how to speak to, and taught him to read over my short stories for me. I also trained him to fetch library books, for which I would give him some peanut butter. I don't know where I got peanut butter. I guess I must have just found it in the woods.

We all had fond memories of that time we lived in Harford 3C and had a wall of rhetoric. Sometimes we missed those times, but we realized we had to move on.