It took me five years to prepare for college.  I've spent four of them behind the retail counter, and I wish to never fetch anyone a snack cake again, unless I love them and they deserve it.

 When I first applied to colleges, based on nothing more than a good verbal SAT score and 36 credits at the community college in lieu of my senior year, and a stupid essay that I'm glad I don't have anymore, I had high hopes.  Obviously, Reed College isn't going to except a student who can't solve for x and y, but I only applied to 2 other colleges anyway.  I got into the other two, which were rural, private, and unknown.

I went to the one in Wisconsin.  I got drunk and high the first semester and nearly flunked out.  I buckled down the second semester only to find that I hated one of my professors with an ideological passion.  He beleived in objective observance through sociology.  I don't believe that a person, even after years of training (unless it is of a meditative sort, and you don't hear about yogis doing field research) can forget themselves, the composite of years, and observe people with zero bias.  

 One day we had an argument over whether toddlers should be allowed to attend lectures if they are disruptive to the speaker, whether having a college degree should affect the evaluation of a person's research, and whether existentialism had happened in the Midwest.  To clarify, I said that it was the speaker's right to kick out loud kids and their parents; that a degree doesn't matter, and that existentialism, though it had happened to me, had not happened in the Midwest.  I looked at the room full of people who suddenly hated me (including the professor, a short man who affected bow ties in 2004 despite being under 35) and thought 'I hate you too, and I need to drop out.'

 I'm a more private, less dramatic sort of asshole now.  For reasons too cumbersome for this blog post, five years later I'm back at that community college.  I have a horrid grade point average, and my goals are a little different.  Get into state school.  Go there.  Graduate.  Get into a minimum of debt, graduate with a degree that offers an iota of hope in the job market.  

I'm less impressed with myself now.  Perhaps everyone comes to realize that they aren't as smart as they'd thought/hoped/assumed they were between 18 and 23.  I'm not going to make a name for myself in academe; I've granted art hobby status; I really just want $30,000 a year and a health plan.  This happened not because the daily grind crushed my dreams, but because my dreams were unrealistic.  I'd never finished anything but an issue of the Atlantic,  and to think I could fly through four years of college was crazy.

I needed to grow up, and I have.