Christine was probably the smartest, and perhaps also the craziest, person I ever met. She would calmly tell me stories of incredible periods of drug abuse in her past and had a certain fascination with serial killers and extremely morbid movies. She still had a tendency to abuse drugs, often doing four or five different kinds in the course of a night. Later on she straightened herself out a bit, married, and got rich working at an Internet startup, like so many others. She continued to pound triple Venti [extra extra large!] Starbucks lattes, though, and would talk about her fatalism and how she didn't mind dying. And yet her one desire in life above all else was to become a British history professor.