The Oracle

Despite majoring in biology, when I was in college, I was the freak science major who hung around with all of the journalism and professional writing students. The logical conclusion of this hanging around was to embark upon a professional writing minor in my sophomore year. This put me in a position of having a whole new pool of English major friends. It also meant that I took most of my "electives" from Prof. P, the college's sole professional writing instructor. Prof. P was cool in so many ways, not the least of which was the conversion of circumstances that made her fit like 6 definitions of "minority" which had lead to a fascinating series of life experiences.

I took all of my writing classes with my partner in crime, ME, who was a year behind me. We worked together on annoying web projects, the painful uploads of the school's online magazine and one very bizarre desktop publishing/financial reporting project. Interspersed among our work were a number of poems, rude jokes and a lot of amusement (often at Prof. P's expense).

For her part, Prof. P would go around spouting these prophetic statements about our futures. She would tell us what she "knew" we would end up doing soon. We would argue that she was wrong and tell her our youthful view of what we "knew" we'd be doing. We were 19 and 20. Of course we knew better. At that age, everyone knows you know everything.

We've been out of college about seven years now. I recently reconnected with ME. We're both at kind of turning points in our careers. Turns out, we're both delving into exactly what Prof. P predicted we would do.

We're worried about what else she may have been right about.

We're terrified to let her know how right she was.

We think she needs to be immortalized as a character in a science fiction novel.