Goodbye college, hello loan payments.
Tomorrow is my last day of college. And I am still procrastinating. This was a habit I had planned to rid myself of long ago, alas…
Five pages of simplistic Spanish musings about the book “Mosen Millan†stand between me and my diploma. I could write them in one hour and be done with it before I go on vacation this Saturday. Then I could commune with the northern Minnesota landscape without preoccupations about the religious symbolism of Paco in the lives of the Spanish peasants.
But it’s not due till next Thursday – that’s more that a week from now – and my fingers are union laborers: they don’t do any school-related typing until all the kinks have been ironed out of the contract (benefits, worker’s comp, etc.). Negotiations are going slowly, so it looks like this is going to end up being one of those last-minute jobs.
Like the Olympic stadiums in Greece.
Cause: am lazy. Result: bringing laptop up north to compose Spanish paper while my feet dangle in the 40-degree waters of a lake bigger than Spain. Fortunately, Grand Marais is only 30 minutes from where we’re staying, and the good people there have set up a bang-up wireless network: you can get a signal anywhere in town (indoors and out), and daily access is just $6.
Oddly, that means I’ll finish my college career on a bench in a park in a small town in northern Minnesota. What began with a bang will close with a click. And then, like it did four years ago when high school ended, my life will begin again.
Or not. College was so much more like high school than I expected; it wouldn’t surprise me if post-college isn’t that different from college. Except for the school supplies. No need to buy scissors and glue and erasers any more, they’ve got cabinets full of that stuff at work.
What? You mean I didn’t need scissors and glue in college? I could have sworn we used scissors in my calculus classe. You know, my Multivariable Calculus class at the University of California – Berkeley? Don’t you remember? We made snowflakes!
Funny how you stop needing to know the things you learned in elementary school. For some reason, you can’t get to calculus without going through the paper-snowflake stage. You will never again need to know how to make paper snowflakes, but without the lower levels you can’t get to the advanced stuff. So what’s more important to teach; scissor handling or differential equations?
The truth is, college is just one of those low-level stages in the end, too. It may cost tens of thousands of dollars more than elementary school, but years from now college will be no more than the base-soil in the great landfill of knowledge I will have by then built up. And on that landfill I will construct cheap, pretty houses to sell at inflated houses.
My brain is the landfill; my words are the houses, in case you’re not following.
So consider yourself lucky, you’re getting this stuff for free. Thirty years from now you’ll have to pay for it. And then you’ll have to put up with that garbage smell too.