A good friend will drink a Bud Light and Clamato with you on a lark. A better friend will finish it.
I am looking down from the steep slope at another transition period, waiting for someone to come along and invent the calculator, forever rendering my steam-powered math obsolete.  Incidentally, I've been trying to get steam-powered math into conversation whenever possible.  I've been trying all week to work it into an idea that sticks together just right--men with antique-moustache faces and fogged over spectacles working at blackboards in the thick, wet rooms of nineteenth century mathematics factories.

Anyway.  Bureaucrats and your HR rep call it a qualified life event.  I'm going to call it an explosion of sociology.  Here's a truth about our working and living at a university: May comes around and the electrons of our social orbits go scattering off into a thousand different directions.  Sometimes electrons come back, other times they're lost in the other, whatever the other happens to be.  Sometimes the conversation doesn't sound quite the same, there are more pauses than there were, meals are consumed more quietly.  Some of us graduate and slowly fade out of each other's lives until we are little more than regrets and unsent text messages.  Calling becomes too personal, a too-frank admission of what we meant to each other, once.  So when you sit down to take a test, know that I'm rooting for and against.  That'll be the chorus line for the next few years.  Sing it for me again sometime when you think of me on a rainy night when we're old.  

I'd say I'm sick of it, but you know that already.  

Let's be failures together forever.