A Blog-like Entity

24 oct 06

What advise would you give to a college dropout besides confessing to your parents that you've spent all these years fooling around?

"advise" is a verb, as in "i will advise him to stay in college, so that he might improve his grammar".

i'm so, so sorry for that. i'm a wicked man, and deserve most of what i get.

i think your parents might have a clue already, considering the fact that you dropped out, unless you crafted up a diploma in photoshop and staged graduation day.

perhaps you believe that they believe you dropped out for some reason other than "he fooled around too much"? maybe, "he wasn't ready for college", or "the pressures were too much for him"? perhaps a more flattering paraphrase of "he fooled around too much": "he didn't apply himself", or even "he wasn't able to apply himself". yeah, i like that last one. go with that.

i'm 99% sure this submitter is a "he", partly because "he"'s are most often the ones who shamelessly squander their college years and become brutally retarded, and partly because there are no non-transgender women on the internet.

incidentally, if you are female and reading this page, i'd like you to raise your hand.

to spend your college years fooling around is to use those years for their intended purpose. the college student's job is to pretend to read some words, write some words loosely based on the words you pretended to read, and get some "B"s on his transcript. i think most of the other time he surfs the internet for porn.

if you're an ambitious go-getter, you go to parties or something -- celebrate some conjunction of humans and alcohol, also usually in conjunction with buildings and nighttime. "hey! let's go drink alcohol in buildings at night!"

with college, an in-crowd is created. students are socialized together within it, such that its customs and mannerisms bind this established culture of the college educated. if you can identify other members of your tribe, you know whom to hire, whom to marry, and with whom you're going to have a drink.

college has become a day care center and social club for middle class high school graduates. people who wouldn't have considered attending college in the 50s and 60s are necessarily attending college now, because it's become a cultural phenomenon that's increasingly removed from academics and intellect.

now, it's simply unthinkable that a white, middle-class kid would not go to college. if he doesn't, he'll get bumped down a notch on the class ladder, in a rare and shameful instance of downward mobility (so he says as he glances over at his chicken-delivery attire).

a college degree is a lapelle pin that reads "this person is a member of the club" -- it's the clearest manifestation of the american caste system. a degree is an indication that the graduate is willing and able to "look the look" and "talk the talk" -- to flash his colors as a member of the tribe.

even engineers learn most of their practical material on their apprenticeships, work co-ops, etc, or even their first employer's on-the-job training, as do doctors, accountants, and lawyers. the way to learn anything practical is to see it done, and then do it in a supervised environment. i'm suspicious of education's practical value, even for "hard" majors and postgraduate career school; it demonstrates that you have resolve and have money, but but i'm not sure what else.

i don't know how often employers actually check to see if an applicant has the degree he claims to have on his resume -- certainly it's not 100% of the time, and perhaps not even 10% of the time. if you send out hundreds of applications fraudulently advertising a college degree, the likelihood of some prospective employer's not checking for it increases. but i don't think this overkill is necessary; i'm inclined to think not many check to see if you actually attended the college you claim to have attended. so, you can claim a harvard BA in anthropology, or something else that has no bearing on job competence or performance.

advice: if you're happy, then don't worry about it, and tell your parents to go fuck themselves. if you're not happy, then start on some antidepressants, or blow your brainstem out through the back of your skull with a 10-gauge.

the fact that you're seeking some advice while self-identifying as a "college drop out" suggests to me that you'd like to go back to school and finish your degree. even though it might be a waste of time and money, it can't hurt, otherwise.

if you don't have anything better to do, or would feel bad if you didn't do it, then by all means go back to school, if you can work it into your life somehow. but i can tell you first-hand that taking classes while working full time drains the essence from your soul, and makes you wonder about the concepts of "fulfillment", "joy", and "purpose".

if i were feeling really cynical, i would talk about how college is a path to enslavement, and how it serves to force you into work by indebting you to the government (a clear example of indentured servitude). after college, you're expected to don a suit and a tie (or maybe just khakis and a button-down these days), and shuffle some electrons about a network that, in their being shuffled, earn a profit for an unseen someone sipping a martini while spend your hours and months under the flourescent lights, caffeine coursing through your bloodstream and wrist-nerves degenerating into over-boiled noodles.

in return, you get a salary (as opposed to an hourly wage), and along with paying off your student loans you can get a house and car, which serves to fatten up the banks from whom you're borrowing that money. this is not to mention the proud college freshman's very first credit card. a college degree is a warm welcome to the wonderful world of "living on credit" -- it's the American Way. if you're already living on credit, then congratualtions! you don't need to go back to school! you have an honorary degree already.

i think my own cynicism echoes that well-known 1960s sentiment, which is probably most often misinterpreted: "tune in, turn on, drop out".

it was in the late 60s, the vietnam war era, when we saw the grade inflation that helped transform college from an institute of learning to a badge of class; grade inflation meant that rich kids, no matter how dumb, could avoid the draft, by attending the newly-opened and aforementioned "white middle class day care center".

a few people in the 60s started to recognize that college works to exclude the underclass from the middle class, and then to make sure the middle class works diligently for the upper class, and were disenchanted. or at least one or two of them were disenchanted, and the rest just went along with it because it was the cool thing to do, in between hash brownies.

i didn't belong in college. the only reason i finished was because it was culturally necessary -- i would have felt like less of a human being if i hadn't finished, a subterranean ogre, a CHUD skulking along the bottom of the sewer system. as it turned out, i wound up delivering chicken with a BA degree (albeit one in "art", which makes a little bit more sense). but delivering chicken while clutching a diploma in your right hand is more acceptable than doing so without, even though working the manual transmission would be a lot easier (i'm sure that metaphor could be extended, somehow).

i'm glad i finally finished college, because it helps my self-esteem. that's the main reason, although i have to admit that i did get a lot out of a few classes. but this is the reason i recommend it to you, dear submitter: you need to keep your few meaningless years on this miserable ball of ruined biosystems as free of self-hatred as possible, under the circumstances.

remember what the BH surfers say about regret.

the advangage of school, as i see it, is that it's a lot easier to learn material when there's someone there forcing you to do it; it's simply a way of self-imposing discipline. it'd be nice if we could all go to the library, check out a book, read it, retain what we read, and maybe even write a few papers on the content, or do some exercises in the back (if it's a math textbook we checked out).

we can't do this, for some reason, and so instead we spend thousands of dollars on school. "you can read all of those books on your own, and teach yourself" has become a cliche sentiment, and one that's unfortunately bullshit. there is almost no-one who can do this. why do you think education, schools, and universities have been around since the inception of civlization?

problem is, "going back to school" usually involves a lot of community college night courses, which tend to be taught by people who aren't, first and foremost, professors, but are rather professionals picking up a few extra bucks on the side. they often don't really know the subject matter and aren't able to answer questions, teach straight out of the textbook, basically reading a chapter of it aloud, and get their tests out of the back of the book. i've had several of these (including my current), and it's demoralizing.

school can be fun, though, if you get into it. and you really do learn things, and it really does affect the way you think about the world. i don't want to come across as objecting to university learning per se, when in fact i think it's a good thing. it's just that college has steered away from its artistic and scholarly roots towards a more moneyed destination, just like film (1928's "The Passion of Joan of Arc" vs. 2006's "The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift"). basically, capitalism is ruining everything. viva fidel!

advice for you? fuckit -- you only live once. go back, if it's feasible. if it's not (if you have to earn a living and don't want to spend your nights in some adult education cesspool), then go into the desert/mountains/woods and do drugs, or leave the planet. i'm trying to think of something to do, myself.