If you have a college degree you can be absolutely sure of one thing…. you have a college degree.

That’s a quote I stole off some website - no accreditation given. It might have very well been me at any point in the past… say, 12 years. I’ve never liked school unless it was creative writing, history, or music. I sucked at math and science and I probably always will - comparatively.

I was determined to not go to college. I even wrote a piece on it in 12th grade called something like “Wall Hangers and Tower Pissers.”

Fact is the first time I decided to go to college was because a girl I was in love with thought it was what I should do. One of her friends mistook me for her brother once who was going to RIT for Mechanical Engineering. I played along for a while, but let’s be clear - I’m no engineer. My Dad worked at Kodak once a long time ago and all I’ve ever heard about was wise ass college kids with engineering degrees fucking up everything they touched. I used to argue with this girl all the time about book smarts and common sense and it being nearly impossible to have both.

She changed my life in some ways I suppose. But then she broke my heart and I decided not to go to school. Suddenly I found myself in the last week of summer vacation after graduating high-school - looking around and seeing that all the intellectuals left town.

So I had 2 choices… stay home with the losers and get really high everyday and keep working with my Dad, or frantically call up Fredonia and beg to be readmitted so I could go to a new town with a friend of mine who played guitar and sang with me - then I could get really high there instead until we made it big.

Needless to get into the amazing story I could tell you about my 1 semester at Fredonia, I ended up having a nervous breakdown, stopped showing up for class and returned to Rochester with - get this - a 0.57 GPA. Take that Animal House! A quick memory I can relate to this blog is Election night 2000. George W. Bush won or something like that (you know that story) and I needed to smoke an 8th and hit the dining hall for eggs and waffles at 8am sharp to cope with it. Then as per ritual, I slept the rest of the day till someone woke me up for dinner. Then we’d watch movies and… well, get high.

anyway… back to Rochester…

Working a real job everyday and not being quite as stoned all the time was pretty lame, so just as I turned 19 I started going back to school at MCC. My first year there was amazing and I never regretted one minute of it. Fuck anyone who tells you it’s just high-school with ash trays. It is what you make it.

I was there on my way to creative writing with my friend Dave when we found out that 9/11 was happening. They shut the campus down and sent us all home. I thought the world might end or I’d get drafted. (This is yet again another highly interesting story I could tell, but it can wait…)

Later, when my girlfriend at the time - 2 years later to be my wife - called me in the start of Spring Semester to tell me that I was going to be a Daddy, that was the final nail in the coffin for my English / Music degree ambitions.

I had a pretty good Job with my Dad’s painting business, so I bought a house, had a kid, saved up some money, got married, and started getting used to a life I expected to mirror very closely my own father’s.

Enter Election 2004… Bush won for real this time (well, I guess you heard that whole story too.) and my Dad decided that things for our business weren’t going to get any better and so he laid me off. I got a job in a machine shop for less than half of what I had made. Suddenly a degree sounded really good - but that was about as far away as becoming a rock star.

Blink your eyes really hard and it’s 2007. My Boss has put me in an mostly office job and my pay, though still not what it once was, has been getting a lot better. I’m working days, and starting to take classes part time at MCC. I recently found out that they’re not really the best place for me to be anymore (another decent story) so I ended up driving over to my wife’s old college.

Now I’m waiting to hear if I’ve been accepted to RIT for part-time evening studies. My boss and I shook hands - that still means something in a few places - that even if it takes me a long time, I’m going to have his help earning a BA in Manufacturing Engineering Technology. In other words, I’m going to be an Engineer someday.

It’s a long road ahead. It’s going to cost everyone involved a lot of money… a whole lot of money. But someday when all this is done, I’ll be able to make as much or more than I did as the VP of a small company. Ideally, I already have the job - I just need the education and the experience to earn the big money. For a day job, I’m ok with that.

Unless a music career takes off for me in the future (yeah right) someday I’ll be an administrator in a medium sized company making a fairly respectable amount of money, and I might be able to wear clothes to work that I wasn’t worried about getting oil, grease, or muck on.

I’ve done this all on my own… lots of hard work and care. I’m tired of paying for the mistakes I made as a stupid kid in high school. It’s perfect poetic justice that the kid who actually asked the math teachers, “when am I ever going to use this?,” actually has to use it now.

I’ve still got a distrust for the establishment and I pretty much hate our government - especially the GOP. One thing I never liked about Republicans is that they don’t want to help anyone with anything. If you can’t get it for yourself, than fuck you. That’s about the message I’ve always gotten from them.

But isn’t is sort of true that it took George W. Bush to fuck up everything in my safe little 1990’s world to get me into something I would have laughed off only a few years ago? I really did have to buckle down and work for it - and the work’s not even close to being done yet!

Republicans screwed shit up so bad… destroyed the economy in the first part of the 21st century that I had to go back to square one and work my way up the ladder like it was 100 years ago. Only I’m fortunate enough that I’m being encouraged to get a degree - they’re even helping me pay for it as long as my grades are there.

Now I’m just hoping that my strong foundation in the working class will keep me grounded enough to make me one of the rare people who are college educated and also have some common sense - or else I’m going to look back on all those arguments I’ve had about this sort of thing and…

You know what? If you look back on your life and try to remember who was wrong or who was right, you’re a fool. And who’s got time for that anyway?

Oh… and don’t worry - I still think George Bush blows donkeys as far as being a president goes.

(Best closing line ever.)