Shit be changin' yo My Precious is back together with a new mainspring and it's delightful. Meanwhile I now have a .edu email address, am about to gain another, and am staring down the barrel of 7am to 5pm with an hour to drive 15 miles and eat a sandwich in between. On the one hand, gonna be crazy. On the other hand, Porsche. When I'm done with this ridonkulous odyssey I'll have 500 credits under my belt; I only know this because I had to get my damn transcripts from nineteen diggity nine and it appears I wasn't that great a student on balance. Don't care, Porsche. I live like a goddamn pirate and can do obnoxious shit like go to ten hours of classes eight months out of the year without quitting my job, giving up my bennies or diminishing my pension so pay attention kidz, grades are nice'an all but they sure ain't the beallendall. The weather turned nice. I need to lay out a shelter to hide my Don't Care Porsche in while I'm busy earning money and also putting the ECM back into my hyperexotic italian dualsport. Because when school starts I'm going to be that really annoying old guy with the really douchey car and the really douchey bike and fuck you kidz I own three goddamn pairs of Gargoyles and I wear them every.goddamn.day. Guy in my class. Incredible artist. Brother wrote Sideways. He thinks "Three-fingered Elgin" (which is what My Precious is) is an awesome pirate name. He's not wrong. Edited to add all the .sigs from both faculties list their pronoun preference, and that when i visited campus last week a chick in like Marshall's stuff walked at 45 degrees to get to the far side of the walkway from me when I smiled at her, and then she took a selfie. College is fuckin' weird and I ain't even up in there yet.
Know what else isn't the beallendall? A good paying job that you're capable at with a nice work environment that isn't something you like. I'm speaking on behalf of some people I know. Both told me it wasn't what they wanted to do. Both are very capable. Both have impressive educations. Both do decent work. Neither do great work. There's no passion, no desire to understand the work and take it further. They only do what they're told because they have no interest in thinking about it deeper. And then I know people with 2.something GPAs from modest schools that are great because they love the work.pay attention kidz, grades are nice'an all but they sure ain't the beallendall.
I can't imagine being in a classroom with you. LOL. Like the teach better know left from right or they are in for some barely contained contempt. Or are the classes covering material so novel that there's not a chance you won't be learning?
I have a degree in mechanical engineering with some 500-level shit in acoustics. I'm taking machining and jewelry design. Yeah, I took like 10 credits on the crystalline structure of steel. I took statics, I took dynamics, I took fluid mechanics, I took thermodynamics. That does not mean I know that you need to knock a couple notches out of your tools if you're working with brass because it'll pull through too fast otherwise. That's the kind of thing you learn in machining class. Which I learned when the instructor quizzed me on the spot to figure out if he'd be wasting my time. Which is more than I learned in my entire 300-level machining class at UW because the instructor was so checked out that he had me teach the welding section, and where the machine tools were the same as the ones I grew up with which were 80 years old at the time except the shit my dad owned hadn't been rode hard and put away wet by 60 years of undergraduate use. I've handled AK-47s with higher tolerances than those poor destroyed lathes. I first ran AutoCAD in 1990. Doesn't mean I know how to drive Rhino. I've sandcast aluminum. Doesn't mean I have a handle on .925 casting grain. I wouldn't be taking these classes if I wasn't expecting them to be vital to my future. It was the same the first time around, except back then I didn't give a fuck what the classes were for. I was a fuckin' terror in high school, but I never said a fuckin' word unless I was called on because I was too busy being depressed and mad and hating everyone (and yes, I was thrown out of four classes, permanently, in three and a half years). In college nobody ever called on me. I considered it a win if I made it through a class without anyone learning my name.
This is how I've approached my classes now. I want to squeeze every ounce of value out of the 90 minutes I have with the professor, hungover fratboy on the left be damned. Me in 2010? Constitutionally incapable of giving a fuck.I wouldn't be taking these classes if I wasn't expecting them to be vital to my future. It was the same the first time around, except back then I didn't give a fuck what the classes were for.