Two thoughts.

1. I have recently identified a very specific way in which reading too many romance novels In My Yoot caused me emotional harm. I feel a little like a master diagnostician finding some disease's unlikely wacky root cause (here is where I should mention House, right?): tis interesting as well as alarming. Now to pluck it out, like playing "Operation." I hope. Probably more complicated than that.

2. Being precocious never gets you anywhere. There isn't one life lesson I haven't had to learn down at the Furthest Extreme of its potential existence, methinks. Despite Knowing things, occasionally. Makes no difference, knowing things, or--as I'm saying--knowing things seemingly Early.

It's a little alarming how often I'm quoting from You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again. But I do. That last idea makes me think about a bit in the book where she at the absolute end of her free-basing rope, has burned up everything in her life, over and over, every bridge, weighs 80 lbs or something...she is in a freebasing researcher's office trying to rationalize going clean, figure out what's going to make her do it now when absolutely every other thing hasn't, and he is saying, "Intelligence is a survival tool." And she's thinking yes, but...look at me. That's life. Being precocious can be a little like having all the tools to--do otherwise, do better--something--at your disposal but still shaking from addiction and pain in some stranger's office anyhow.