10:16 p.m. Another morning-after for another stranger on our street. A last '99th bottle of beer on the wall, with extra limes. Not mine. My head is light and my conscience is clear as a bell. A party I must have missed. I merely recorded the evidence because that's what I do. I am a writer.

I really didn't know what to do with myself today. I'm not good at vacations. I like structure, deadlines, pressure -- and I hate them, too. I like nothing better than to work through the night -- unless it's to party until I drop.

I've always been very, very conflicted. I remember it started when I was a freshman in a big, almost urban high school after being a sheltered student in a little middle small-town school. Suddenly I was confronted with the world of possibilities and boundless opportunity. All I had to do was choose my poison.

Remember after-school teams and clubs? Here was a chance to create a new, winning personality from whole cloth, but I didn't know who to be or what to become. I joined a whole bunch of extracurricular activities to learn certain fundamental truths about myself. Truths I've never forgotten, even now. Real life is not that different from high-school in the late afternoon.

For instance, I don't like to debate. Thought I would, especially when they specified that we would need index cards, sharpened pencils, and bookmarks. But I participated in only one debate, and I've still got the card to show that my side lost in this gripping issue: Resolved: The high protective tariff is important.

What was I thinking?

Next, I tried the drama club. Loved the costumes; couldn't memorize. I kept wanting to change the words. After that debacle I tried running for school office, but I didn't like asking people for favors, so that didn't work out. Future nurses -- too many demeaning tasks. Ditto future secretaries.

The only real sport I liked in our high school was girls' basketball and the lower cutoff point was 5 feet, three inches. The all-important basketball cheerleading squad had an upper limit of 5 feet two inches. My height: 5 feet, two-and-a-half inches. Of course.

Well, that left the math and science clubs. I like beakers, but not the funky smells of agar-agar and formaldehyde. Home ec was not an option -- my mother would have left work, climbed on the bus, and dragged me home by my saddle shoelaces if she thought I was staying after school pretending to learn how to cook and clean.

So, that basically left the geeky writer's groups. Did I want to learn photography and work on the yearbook, scribble some poetry and pretend I understood it for the literary magazine, or learn how to type and join the school newspaper?

I chose wisely, if not well, and the rest, as the say, is history. Readers, I joined the newspaper, and my lifetime fate was sealed. I chose this particular club, not because I had a yen for news or because I especially liked to write, truth to tell. I joined because they gave the best parties.

Big, blowout, heaving parties to celebrate the monthly pub dates. A party before the deadlines to psyche everybody up. Another during the deadline to keep everybody going. A big one when the issue came out. A small one or two or three to brainstorm new ideas immediately after. A party because it was Friday, or because Beryl was getting engaged, or because we didn't run out of rubber cement balls.

A party every single day through my entire high school career. I didn't learn much in high school during class time, what with missed assignments and naps and all. But I did learn the importance of extracurricular activities in a young person's life.

Oh yeah. And that's how I became a writer.