March 31, 2002

cross-legged jabbering

I’m trying valiantly to study for my media law quiz tomorrow, but it just ain’t happening. All I want to do is drink plantation mist tea and draw pictures of lighthouses, trenchcoats, fedoras and sailboats. I want to dig out my Sam and Max comic book and do some firearm studies, maybe learn how to draw a stunning pair of crossed legs.

Sigh. Watch out, this is coming clear out of nowhere:

I must note that I don’t feel my level of college suffering is much worse than anyone else’s… it’s just that other students don’t have the words nor the forum in which to organize and argue against their captors. I have placed upon myself the burden of vocalizing the restless souls of kids that yet feel unfulfilled in college. When it gets down to it I really enjoy this burden. It’s cathartic, it’s chopping wood, it’s using tools I gleaned from the Collegiate Machine against it, and it has a kind of romantic deception to it. Call me Herakles. I’m gonna learn everything I can from my master, and end up killing the poor bastard.

I’ve been grappling with the problem since freshman year (a handwritten 100 page journal started at the tail end of 1999, and the two that followed, is evidence of this) and though I have made little progress in making myself more content, I’ve made significant headway in developing an unfortunate anti-college manifesto. However, all effort has not been lost, quite to the contrary. I did make myself much more marketable by changing my major from jazz to writing. While my future is still uncertain, it will now hopefully involve minimal intimate contact with gutters.

I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance what seems like ages ago (I think it was only a year), and while it wasn’t the greatest book and didn’t shatter my world like all the praise said it would, it gave a few pages on college that were worth thinking about. I wish I had the book right now so I could review those pages, a bit wiser, to see if I still hold them as true as I did then.

Honestly, I don’t want to be miserable in my environment, and if I could find some way to reconcile my passions with college, I would do so in a heartbeat. In first grade we were supposed to draw Johnny Appleseed. I drew him getting eaten by a venus fly trap. In third grade I asked my teacher why, when we changed seating charts, I was always in back. She said it was because I was always drawing and listening at the same time. While I was able to draw all day and still do an excellent job in school, if other kids were to follow my example they might have been less fortunate. Junior high offered art classes as an outlet, high school had heavy involvement in the music program, and I still need to strike the balance in college. After nearly three years at the anvil, crudely hammering away at molten thoughts, I’ve found little commonality that naturally brings my two worlds together.

I love the people of college. I love my friends, I love Wooch! I love the nerds, I love the hotties in the hallway that make me quirl, I love my professors… I love how college gives me an excuse to chill with all these great people with interests that can be so similar and so different from my own. Yet I hate the things that dominate my time and distract me from the people. While I do enjoy alone-time, and would quickly go crazy with people jabbering around me 24 hours a day, too often alone-time becomes synonymous with homework-time in college. It’s either people, homework or sleeping. Lately with me, it is thinking about doing homework, distracting self with more interesting work, sleeping.

Beckons. Media Law. Heidegger. News Editing. Spin the roulette wheel and decide which one will get done tonight.

Only a college student would go to google and type in “anti-college” and hit “search.” Yeah, that’s how I came to see your site, and, let me say, I am feeling very anti-college too. I have been since freshman year (which was two years ago), and yet I still find myself here. I wonder why we can’t just walk away from things we don’t believe in. Fear, maybe. Maybe it’s because I don’t know where else I’d be right now if I weren’t here. But rounding the corner to a point any day now, I guess I’m trying to say that, with the exception of very few people, I find college full of rampantly boring unoriginal upper-middle-class kids. In high school, my friends were amazing and fun and genuinely interesting…and we used to make fun of the rest of the kids in our AP classes who sat there with Prada loafers and Abercrombie and Fitch jeans. I didn’t realize that when I signed up for this university, I was signing up for 7000 of those kids we hate. Well, thanks for letting me rant. Have a good one.

i quit, now i’m 20 years old, live in my mom’s basement, and don’t have health insurance, any suggestions?

We should form a union to demand $20,000 a year plus free tuition to go to college. As it is, all a college degree really means is that you’re willing to sacrifice four years of your life and sacrifice growing up to conform to the demands of the parasite corporations. Fat cats love mice. They have no right to do this.
We create all their wealth by submitting to schemes like this. Corporate property is not private property.
However, dropping out means dropping in to them bottom of their rich-get-richer system. We must form our own economy with paid on-the-job training. Meanwhile, the best tactic is “if you can’t beat them, take them over.” We should major in Business Administration and ignore the arts and sciences and possibly have more time to earn money and live like men and not Mama’s Boys.
A scientist for a biotech company got a $30,000 bonus for his invention, which the corpies then sold for $300,000,000. This 99.99% larceny is what unpaid education has been devised to set up. Only slave boys go to college and live like 12-year-olds until they’re 22. That’s just the type of wimp the parasites are looking for.

College has no real value. It is a game designed to turn you into a toy.
All a college degree proves is that you were willing to sacrifice four years of your life for your future employer. Four years of working without pay (slavery) and living like a 13-year-old. Fat cats want mice; realize that and you can play their game without becoming mousetrapped. Don’t trade your manhood for money.
Dropping out is no escape; it only means dropping into the dirt floor of their puppet show to be constantly stomped on by their diplomaed pinocchios.
Nor can you drop out within college into childish escapist actiivities. You have to make money now, at least 300 a week. A big opportunity is available through separating rich students from their allowances. Also, get a job on or near campus so you won’t have to skip too many classes.
Minimize time wasted on classes and homework. You have to budget your day into three parts: classroom slavery, earning money, and spending money like an adult. If working and school is all you do, you’re lifestyle will be just as lifeless as that of the wimps who actually believe in education. College is a fraud; you can beat it by faking it.
When you get a yuppie job, come on like a typical sheep-with-a-sheepskin and then proceed to screw your employer any way you can. Fake gratitude, but never be grateful to some fat cat who demanded that you work 4 years without pay before you could work for him. Remember that his own children in effect got paid to go to college in the form of their allowances. In college, be a wolf in sheep’s clothing and gobble up the fat cats’ kittens.

The only thing I learned in college was how to cheat successfully. It’s no wonder today, at the ripe age of 25 after dropping out (finally, thank god) and starting my own business, I’m earning six figures! Look around you. As Gorden Gecco said in Wall Street, “If you’re not on the inside you’re on the outside, pal…” And it’s true.
Today when I interview people for positions within my company, I ask them to tell me what they learned in college. When they stutter and look about the room and try to hose me with fabricated sentances about “open exchanges of ideas, etc.” I ask them to stop. Then I ask if they learned anything in college besides how to correctly hit a bong or shotgun a beer. Almost always, they wipe their brows and sigh. Then it comes. They leaned nothing. Nothing applicable. Nothing practical. Nothing at all. Mom and Dad’s hard-earned money down the pisser. How do I know they at least attended college. The resume, of course.
The resume is the most worthless document known to man. It contains nothing, besides contact information, an employer needs to know. It’s all crap. From “Master degrees” to “Implimented a successful (insert fabrication for working a cash register here).” All worthess. And they have classes at most major colleges that focus on resumes. That’s all they teach. It’s hilarious. Hell, I can get on the computer and in fifteen minutes, provided I spell everyting correctly, become a Harvard-educated scientist from Belgium. And I’d get hired, somewhere.
If you can’t cheat on an exam and get away with it, I don’t want to hire you. If you can’t get creative, I don’t want to hire you. If you thought college and all you learned there makes you a smarter of better person, hit the road.
Do I cheat in business? Of course not. Not my point. My point is any idiot can snort ritalin all night and memorize worthless things on an exam. It takes a special someone to get a copy of the test beforehand and successfully cheat, while “Grad Students” patroll the halls. (This should proove beyond a doubt that if you’re thiking about grad school, PLEASE don’t do it. You’ll become an underpaid classroom cop for “professors” who don’t want to do their jobs.)
I’m right.
So stop what you’re doing. Drop out. (Don’t tell mom and dad, however, if you want your money to get cut off.) And for other reasons too. Making my parents and society happy by staying in school is the only thing that kept me there the first two years. You have to overcome this. So much value is put on college and “degrees” that in my case, and this is the crux of the matter, once I sat in those classes and listened to basic faliures (i.e. “Teachers”) ramble on about nothing, all at a level much below the academics I did well with in high school… it was a horrible let down. I discovered I had been lied to — again.
First Santa, then the Easter Bunny, then drugs (you know, marijuana will make you kill people and yourself, etc.), then college.
Think for yourself, please. And cheat all you can!
But let me get back.