Chickpeas, H&M sweaters, and mediocrity

-What does one do with partially-soaked chickpeas? I went a bit crazy (like, 30 cents worth of crazy) at the bulk section of Whole Foods, and am trying to decide if this recipe would make going out in 20-degree weather for parsley and mint worthwhile. But I have trouble coming up with recipes that don't end in, '... and then you put it on top of pasta.'

-If this is one of them designer-collaboration extravaganzas, how is it possible that I used to own one of the very same sweaters, or one remarkably similar, from H&M, I think one in Chicago, until the $6-ish garment turned into thrift-store material?

-Why, Philip, why? OK, so beyond the fact that I was not wild about this book, there's the limitation of the autobiography and semi-autobiographical novel that I suppose could be called the A-Student Limitation. (See also.) So often, we get to hear about the life of the student who always felt different from everyone else (up to this point, all can identify with the sentiment) on account of he was simply more brilliant than everyone else, a fact recognized by his performance on exams, and questioned only by ill-intentioned if not bigoted teachers and school administrators. The genre of good-little-boy autobiography is interesting, I guess, insofar as it allows us to see limitations present at various times and places, keeping the excellent from reaching their full potential and all that. But the internal angst of the student who's never so much as seen an A-, whose exam came second only to Sartre, it gets old. But so, too, does the look-how-far-I-fell memoir, of getting kicked out of school, of near-fatal overdoses, and so forth. Just as it does not make people dull that they've excelled in school, failure does not imply a fascinating life story - often just a boring old refusal to hand in homework on time. What would be fun would be an autobiographical novel or, why not, autobiography of mediocrity, of the A-/B+ student.