I had a gold tassel from the National Honor Society on my mortarboard, and I even knew how to spell it. But then I enrolled in a nice girls' college without bothering to inquire whether or not they offered a major in the field I wanted to study. Not so smart. The only one of those four I had any real chance of achieving was finishing my first novel. Which probably would have occurred, had I begun the thing correctly in the first place.
Lifelong success hangs on such tiny details.
But as I already admitted, I am sometimes smart and sometimes not so. Of course, my name wasn't Beanie Goldenberg, and it was never going to be. Which was the point, really. How much more interesting a life a Goldenberg would lead, as opposed to that of a Scandinavian-Irish person from the Midwest. Yeah, that was it.