My friend Stan Muller tells me that when you’re living in the middle of history, you never know what it means. I am living in the middle of the internet. I have no idea what it means.

I give the internet three stars.

ACADEMIC DECATHLON

BEGINNING IN TENTH GRADE, I attended a boarding school in Alabama, where my best friend, Todd, was also my roommate. He would often say that late at night, when he was trying to fall asleep in our air-conditionless dorm room, I turned into a stream-of-consciousness novel. I’d tell him everything—my every interaction with my English class crush, including selected quotations from the notes she and I exchanged; the reasons it just wasn’t possible for me to turn in the paper I had due for history; the weird ache I always felt on the outside of my left knee; how nervous I’d been smoking a cigarette behind the gym because someone got caught there last week; and on and on and on until finally he would say, “Seriously, Green. I love you, but I have to sleep.” We were not afraid to say “I love you” to each other.

Here’s my favorite story about Todd: In those days, the SAT was offered only every other month in Alabama. Todd and I managed to miss the last local SAT test before our college application deadlines, so we had to drive to Georgia to take the test. After a road trip and a night in a Motel 6, we arrived bleary-eyed at the testing site, where I struggled to concentrate for four endless hours. When the test was at last over, I met back up with Todd. The first thing he said to me was, “What’s ‘ostentatious’ mean?” And I told him it meant, like, “showy” or “over the top.” Todd nodded subtly to himself and then, after a second, said, “Cool. I got them all then.”

And he had. Perfect score on the SAT.

It was Todd who had the idea for me to join the Academic Decathlon team, although at first blush I seemed a poor candidate. I never excelled academically, and took some pride in “not fulfilling my potential,” in part because I was terrified that if I tried my hardest, the world would learn I didn’t actually have that much potential. But in my poor grades, Todd sensed an opportunity.

Academic Decathlon, sometimes known as AcaDec, features ten disciplines. In 1994, there were seven “objective” events featuring multiple-choice tests: economics, fine arts, language and literature, math, science, social science, and a “Super Quiz” in “Documents of Freedom.” There were also three subjective events graded by judges—an essay, an in-person interview, and the performance of a speech.

Every school’s AcaDec team has nine players: You get three A students, with grade point averages above 3.75; three B students, with GPAs above 3; and three C students, whose GPAs are 2.99 or below. For all you non-Americans out there, that means three of each school’s players get excellent marks, three get good ones, and three must be . . . fairly bad at school. I, as it happened, was terrible at school. Todd believed that with his patient instruction and my awful grades, he could mold me into an Academic Decathlon superstar.