Live from: Venice Beach, LA. January 2012.I went to Vassar College. It's pretty much in the top ten lists of anything you can find out there when it comes to ranked places to send your chitlins for learning-type stuff. It'll never compete with Harvard or Yale or Princeton, and they specifically don't intend to pick that fight.
Ok, I admit, that back then, I was aching to go to Yale, or any Ivy for that matter. I come from a Yale/Princeton family (brother, father, uncle, grandfather), and I guess I assumed that shoe would fit. But I had high SAT scores and low grades, and teachers who mostly touted only my "potential."
Which means I had a brain better suited for excitement/fun/tomfoolery than arithmetic/spelling/reading, and I should consider myself pretty lucky to have gotten into Vassar in the first place.
If I really wanted to roam those hallowed halls and have that crown upon my head, I guess I could have applied myself and had a lot less fun. But what would I have had to give up?
The memory of backing my car into a open garage in broad daylight, and stealing a case of beer while the blissful victim mowed his lawn? Sneaking into the abandoned ski-resort and having a party and kissing that girl who smelled like peppermint and cranberries? Hauling the only source of beer through a dark forest for the 50 people waiting around the campfire at an empty boy scout camp in 30 degree weather? Busting ass through a neighborhood trying to remember where we parked after the parents came home early? Driving down Westtown road in single file with our headlights off? In essence; the living? And let's not talk about karma here, I've done my fair share of repaying for these youthful delights.
And would I be anywhere different than where I am now?
Perhaps. Maybe all I would have is a different sweatshirt sitting in my closet that I never wear.
It's all crap. I got nothing from college when I was in it. Or, better stated, my father paid for the company I would keep, rather than the lessons I easily soaked up and spit back out. Because you can go to a "well, excuuuuse-me!" school like any of the ones I have named and not be any smarter on your way out.
The same way you can be quite old and have nothing to teach. So what significance does a MBA, or an MD, or a PHD, have?
In my opinion, they are pretty toys, and they are distractions from the serious things. I have not yet leaned on someone else to support a point but I'll grab some Thoreau for you, but I'll also synopsize and subtract the thee's and thou's; "Who is more likely to cut his fingers? The boy who had made his own jackknife from the ore that he himself dug and smelted, reading as much as was necessary for this? Or the boy who attended lectures on metallurgy and in the meanwhile was given a penknife by his father?"
Someday there will be a good sentence for what I am doing. Just one simple sentence that encompasses it all. I yearn for it. But it the meanwhile, I recognize that it isn't my paper resume which can ever adequately speak of me, but only what I have remembered to remember, and apply, that will define me.
