We had a boring assembly a few weeks before the eighth-grade graduation ceremony. The ceremony was probably the week after the last episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. A teacher passed around a clipboard upon which we wrote our full names as we wanted them laser-printed on our diplomas. In a fit of whimsy I put down my middle initial as Q (which it's not). In Trek, Q is omnipotent. My adolescent feelings of powerlessness - ridiculously transparent.

At graduation we had a "Reader's Theater" where all thirty graduates could say a few words. I think they played a Garth Brooks song about a river and a journey. We all held roses in little water-filled plastic cylinders with green rubber gaskets.

I don't remember what I said. Given that I then had an obsession with clever analogies (another reason I loved Snow Crash), it may have been, "Life is like a math book. Some of the answers you get at the end, but some you have to figure out for yourself."

Another Trek fan at school, one of the people who were the closest thing I had to a friend, took my suggestion and Q's words from the final episode. He came up last in the Reader's Theater and said, "All good things must come to an end."

On the way home my parents discovered the Q on my diploma. They were kind of upset and worried that this would harm me in some unspecified way. It hasn't.