Since you are young, you are basically taught to be the best you can be. Be that somebody you know you can be, that special star in the twilight. While some people, the very small minority, do this through athletics or some real lucky break like an acting job or a special family/parents, most strive for their best via education. Knowledge is power. You can make so much more money if you get your degree. Basically, since grade school we are told that the key to success is college.
For most of my life, I've been doing that. Going from school to school, this diploma to that degree to the next one. The cycle hasn't stopped either for me, at least not yet. Therefore, I guess I am not really one to complain about this, as I am the very evil that I am preaching against. Hell, I am expressing this on a pedantic blog I run that no one is going to read just to express my opinion to make myself feel better about it. Anyway, that's neither here nor there. The point of this post is about two things that happened this week that I want to talk about that seem to form a bit of a motif.
I have been in graduate school at an esteemed catholic university in the midwest for 2.5 years now. Finally fed up with it, I resigned to get a thesis-less Master's this past week. I may go into the details into a later blog post, I may not. After I informed my boss of my resignation, I took a month long holiday. I did not check my email at all. Questionable decision? Probably, but I'm not going to debate that right now. About two weeks after my decision, I started getting messages from the secretary of my department. I originally ignored them, but after they started getting more frequent, I finally decided to meet this past Wednesday and get it over with.
It was...honestly, one of the worst days of my month, to say the least. I took three anti-anxiety pills to cope with it and went in early as to avoid my boss (she doesn't come in until 10). I show up around 815, and this is where the story starts. They seemed genuinely concerned for me. They asked what I was doing next, what my plans were. They genuinely wished the best for me. I am an extremely cynical person, and this whole endeavor that I may or may not involve THE INTERNET with later has had me worse than normal. I actually was touched by their sincerity.
It turns out the paperwork I had to fill out was to be a cross campus trip to get multiple signatures from several deans. The deans looked at me with different levels of contempt, making me feel more like rejected trash with each signature I received.
At the end of it, I turned in the paper work and was free to go, afterwards coming back home to sleep for a few hours. Waking up, I checked my email and found an email from my boss. Another angry email berating me for leaving and whatnot. I won't get into the details here, but it made me feel pretty awful.
Luckily, I had lunch with a friend of mine at the food court in the local mall after all this was said and done. This friend never went to college, and is working as a hairdresser currently. Well, I had lunch, she kind of just sat around and talked. She then took me to a novelty gift shop in the mall to show me this foot massage contraption she was excited about. Overall it was a good time, and it helped me get over the stress from earlier in the day a bit.
It made me think though, does education take away general friendliness from people? Maybe as you become more educated, you gain more stress, and the wonder and enjoyment of life begins to leak from you. Arrogance shows up, and you lose the humility that might make you a friendlier person. If you aren't as educated as others, perhaps the humility you still have manifests a genuine care for other people that goes away with further education. I don't know, but the kindness of my friend and the secretaries clashed sharply with the educated people I had to communicate with. I'm not saying this is how it is with everyone, but it seems humility and friendliness do not show up well with education sometimes. This can lead to cut throat worlds out there.
Anyway, there was more on this subject I wanted to post, but I'll do that at a later time. Getting tired of writing.
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