How It Got To This Point

I did go to college right after high school.  I spent a year at a Baptist school (chapel every Friday, Bible classes as prerequisites) studying Music Education (read: singing every.single.day).  It wasn't for me.  To be very frank, I completely tanked at it.  It might have been because I've been singing ever since I could reliably stand with other kids in a straight line and I was completely burnt out from it.  It could be that a Baptist school was the worst possible environment for someone with as many subversive leanings as I have.  It could have been that I was eighteen and just didn't give a shit.

I went home every weekend to see my boyfriend (my husband now), and basically didn't engage.  I spent a lot of time on campus running a highly scientific experiment regarding the length of time you have to spend lying prone on a mattress before you actually become one with it.  I hated my roommates (by the end of the first semester, I'd had two) and eventually completed my hermitude by getting a private room.  (Hermitude is a word.  I know, because I just made it up.)  I shared a bathroom that second semester with friends who kept me from becoming a disgusting shadow of my former self, allergic to sunlight and snarling at passers-by.  One of them even got me an on-campus job teaching English as a Second Language, which turned out to be awesome.

I left school in May of 1997.  It is now February 2011.  That's almost fourteen years completely outside the world of academia, unless you count parent-teacher conferences at Montessori and elementary schools, and volunteering at bake sales.  I got a job when I left school.  I moved out, got married, had kids and a career.  And for the last two years, I've been working for myself.  But there's a huge difference between the money I make now and the money I could make if I had that accounting degree.

Thus, here we are.  Far from the year I spent drenched in Tracy Chapman, laying on my twin bed wondering what does it all meeeean?.  You get way more out of college when you're past thirty.  If it wasn't for the fact that we, as a nation, would have a hugely unskilled workforce between the ages of 18 and 30, I'd say everyone should do it.  You go to class religiously, because it's your money on the line, and money means something to you now.  You listen.  You take notes.  You actually study.  You realize that alcohol affects your ability to do all of the above, so you don't do it on school nights.  Maybe some people do that the first time around.  If they do, they are much more mature as a young person than I ever was.  (Disclaimer in case my mother is reading this: I did not drink at Baptist School.  It was a dry campus.  But if it hadn't been, there's no telling what I would have done.)

Clearly, there are drawbacks, too.  We downsized our housing situation to accommodate me doing this.  I'm working part-time and being a mom too, which conflicts far more often than you might think.  And I spend a lot of time being utterly exhausted.  But it's a trade-off I'll gladly make for having this experience and, by the end of it, the means to make our lives and our kids' lives a lot better.

So here's what you can expect from me here on this blog.  I promise to give you (mostly) unvarnished accounts of my time here at City College of the City (or CCC, as I'll probably refer to it, because I like anagrams).  I promise to liveblog my US History class once a week, which is hilarious all on its own, with no input from me.  Because I find the experience entirely entertaining (clearly I like alliteration as well), I promise to try to entertain you in return.  If you have pots of money and you think I'm funny and would like to buy the blog, I promise to sell out promptly and with lots of fanfare.  My kids will one day need to go to college.  But hopefully not before they're thirty.