#663 Yearbook Counselor

The other day I went through the new phone book to see if any of the lawyer’s pictures had aged.
Or the lawyers in the pictures had aged.
The phonebook sometimes make me think there’s some vast juris-not-very-prudence afoot whereby lawyers sell their souls to the devil to appear eternally young, vigorous and ready to defend your interests.
It’s like a high school yearbook, and they all kind of look the same.
There’s lots of lawyers. That got me thinking about high school counselors and what they recommend their student charges get into.
My high school counselor and I never got along. In fact, by carefully listening to every thing she recommended I was supposedly capable of doing, which she had scientifically determined by glancing at my grades, my aptitude tests, my IQ tests and my “permanent record,” I was able to chart a course through life that has been rewarding, fulfilling and successful.
I did that but listening to her and then doing the opposite of everything she recommended.
I was a contrary cuss in my youth, and more, I resented that the only reason she was my counselor was that my last name started with “F.”
It was like some brokered marriage in India or something.
Here was the person upon whom my destiny supposedly rested. The guide to set me on the path of my future. And the only thing qualifying her for the job was my position in the alphabet.
We didn’t hit it off instantly. Anti-charisma as it were. A sudden and unexplainable mutual repulsion.
But hey, in those days could you ask for another counselor that you might feel actually had your best interests at heart—or that actually had a heart—and wasn’t some timeclock-punching functionary anxious to move on to the students who started with G?
Nope. Not as many choices then.
Like in every picture in my yearbook, the hair on boys is all the same and doesn’t go down past the top of their ears.
They sort of look like a bunch of lawyers.
America, ya gotta love it