Newscasters have been describing the bizarre California weather as a "winter mix." Winter mix? Back in middle school, winter mix was that melange of steamed broccoli, cauliflower, and lima beans that they dished out in the school cafeteria. We never knew why it was called winter mix, exactly. I guess winter was just the season for serving the world's most objectionable food.

This started me thinking about the institutional foods of the past, and the general nastiness we endured in the name of education. There was meat loaf, corn dogs, spaghetti with sauce (we were never informed as to the meat content), and the requisite tuna surprise. Our pizza often was laced with leftovers. If you were brave enough to look beneath the petrified canopy of cheese, you might see peas, pieces of corn, etc. There was also something called Panther Rib, which bore a slight resemblance to the McRib sandwich, but without the barbecue sauce or the taste. The panther part came from our mascot, although why we'd want to be eating our mascot, even for pretend, was a mystery to me. Maybe it was a Celtic, drinking-the-blood-of-the-fallen sort of thing.

Kevin was one of the meaner kids in class. He had a wicked smile, and a passion for disrupting class with simulated fart sounds. Usually, Kevin picked on the smaller kids, but one time he embarrassed me terribly by holding an anatomy book in front of my face and pointing to a diagram of the breasts. I was mortified, but I do remember looking at the strange way the tissues seemed to be folded around inside the breast, and thinking how odd that was, and how I wasn't sure I wanted any of that stuff anyway.

It all started when I had to stay the night at Greg G's house.

Greg's mom and my mom were best friends, so Greg and I were forced to spend a lot of time together. Every Sunday after church, our families would go to the restaurant at the Ramada Inn to eat lunch together. Greg and I were always bored during the meal. We'd sit squishing green jell-o through our teeth until our parents dismissed us, at which point we'd go out to the lobby and monopolize the sit-down Centipede game. Sometimes we'd fight over the controls.

Greg and I had a conditional friendship, the condition being that no one in school could ever know about it. The problem? He was a boy, and I was a girl. Neither of us really believed that the other had cooties, but we had to stand behind the party platform anyway. It was just one of those things.

My alumni magazine arrived today, and it got me thinking about old times. Or, as Shakespeare put it, for "my salad days, when I was green in judgment." For the love of all that is holy, people, don't choose English as your major unless you are prepared to suffer. There's a reason there are more English majors at your local fast food joint than any other type of college graduate. There's a reason Garrison Keillor makes jokes about English majors working menial jobs and diagramming sentences just to freshen up their skill set. It's because English departments attract the kind of people who are dreamers, who are so right brained they can't manage to coordinate their socks, and who are too absorbed in their Victorian novel to pay the heating bill. I know this, of course, because I was one.