Some of my friends have graduated and moved into the real world. After four years of school and tens-of-thousands of dollars of loans, a friend of mine has obtained a secure position at Starbucks.
It’s not like Starbucks is a bad place to work; it just doesn’t take a college degree and mortgage-sized loan debt to get the green apron. If he had skipped college, he could have been manager by now.
I went to college to get a leg up on the competition which I thought would make me feel better but it made me feel unbalanced as one of my legs, along with one of my feet, was up and not planted securely on the ground.
When I was in high school, everyone told me I needed to acquire a skill, attend college or win the lottery. It seemed odd that they used the word attend which made me think I had to just show up like in high school.
I took an assessment of my resources and realized I was not skilled in the trades. Growing up, I tried to fix things around the house; after I was done, they needed more fixing than before I started. And my uncle has played the lottery for thirty years and could have purchased five homes with what he threw down on tickets yet he’s still living in a rented condo. The only option for me was college.
Arriving at school, I expected it to be more engaging than high school. The lecture would be in an outside amphitheatre with a teacher like Robin Williams who would jump up on a rock and speak in Shakespearian sonnets; my expectations were less reasonable than a drunken weekend with Kim Kardashian. The lectures were just as boring as they were in high school but with Apple laptops scattered around the room. At first, I thought this was for students to take digital notes so they could save one copy on their computer, another on a flash drive, and a third on a cloud. The laptops were actually used for Facebook, Yahoo Messenger, and to play online video games during class.
At first, I placed the blame on the students around me. Then my attention started to wane and I had an Einsteinian Theory of Relativity moment. We homo-hobili speak 100 to 150 words a minute with bursts of 250. The human brain comprehends at 700 to 800 words a minute. While not in class, we play video games that move at hyper- speed; we watch movies with gunfire and explosions, reality shows with short tempered hair-pulling lunatics. And if that isn’t enough, we love sports with slam dunks and game-winning-end zone catches.
My first stop when I arrived on campus, that is after settling into my closet of a dorm room where my bed touched three walls at the same time and almost the ceiling as well, was the book store. I walked in with a $1500 bill and came out with a pallet of books and $.72. I thought of this as an investment in my education with the hopes that I could sell them back to the bookstore at the end of the semester for three-quarters of what I paid.
The wholesome diet my parents thought I was getting of fruit, vegetables, and meat with the microwave pizza when I’m studying late has been replaced. I’ve learned that college has created a fifth food group which negates the other four; it contains Ramen soup, McDonalds, Red Bull, Starbucks, Butterfingers, and the Pabst Blue Ribbon beer which I can purchase a six-pack for a dollar and still get back change.
After a few years of college, this is what I’ve learned:
-$150 chemistry books make really expensive beer coasters after the bookstore offers you $4 back for a fifteen week old book because the 10th edition has been replaced by the 11th edition which has minor rewordings so you get ripped off and the book can’t be reused and students next semester will have to buy a brand new 11th edition for the increased price of $160 because all of the material in the 10th edition is no longer valid which makes me wonder about what I’ve learned in chemistry and from the dated 10th edition
-lemon juice and soda makes an excellent beer stain remover until you’ve finished the semester and have text book coasters littered about
-the seven-hundred page literature book is a poor investment when the professor only goes through fifty pages of it
-literature books make great insect killers, door stops, and window-holder-openers for windows that have lost their spring and slam shut on your thumbs
-bringing up the movie Shakespeare in Love in a class on the Elizabethan era will lose you class participation points – but it might get you a date with the girl next to you who dresses like Paris Hilton
-a laptop is a great way to hide a cell phone so you can text your friends in the classroom across the hall
-I can stay awake for three days with a pack of Red Bull which lets me drink and play poker in my friend’s dorm room until 3am and still make it to class in the morning because every class that’s is required for my major is only taught at 8am
-it’s understood that in classes that start before 10am, it’s okay to show up wearing the shorts you wore to bed and not brush your teeth while carrying a Starbucks coffee that so big, it’s got whitecaps in it and a NO DIVING sign on the side
-no matter how many blue books you fill up, you’re still not getting an A on the essay part of the exam
-when you do get the exam and don’t recognize any of the material on it, you’re in the right classroom and you’re not alone – you are a part of a great tradition of clueless students who graduated somehow got jobs and procreated and breathed life into offspring who became clueless college students – it’s The Circle of Life
I just look forward to graduating into a world where, after sending out 1000 resumes while drinking countless Vente-moca-frapa-iced-caramel-macchiatos at Starbucks, I’ll obtain and entry level position that I’ll loathe while working for a boss who forgets what it’s like to be the new guy and do it all so I can pay off my loans just in time for my own kids to go to college. At least my children will have plenty of coasters, doorstops, and dated educational material to help prop open the windows.
