PhD in Life
Folks are sometimes surprised to learn I actually went to college. It could be they’re surprised I could get in, much less graduate. But mostly I think they don’t understand why someone would go to four years of advanced education so he could work blue collar jobs half his life. Kids nowadays go to a university, they’re going to come out with a debt that looks mountainous right out of the starting gate. They’re probably not gonna look for a minimum wage job and a cheap apartment above the TV repair shop the way I did. Then again, I didn’t come out of college in the hole. In fact, I rolled out with enough money in the bank from working 30 hour a week jobs while going to school that I figured why work at all for awhile? That, for you ambitious young’uns, was the first mistake.
You can learn to like not working for other people. Or, in my case, you can learn that on top of hating to work for other people. I took summers off, then I took spring and fall off. Mostly I would work for two or three months, give notice and take a long well-deserved vacation traveling around the country. Which is how I found Washington State and the Olympic Peninsula. I vowed to move out, buy a slug farm, cultivate mosses and ferns, make a new life in the foggy temperate rainforests. I didn’t quite make it to the coast, but … close enough for me.
I guess if you graduate with a degree as versatile as an English major – coupled with a second major in Sociology – your options for careers are pretty near exponential. Meaning, you can work most of those jobs folks with MBA’s from Harvard probably aren’t applying for. Nowadays the young student is more likely to take a degree in business or international studies than American Literature given that tuition costs aren’t the 250 dollars a semester I had to dole out back in 1968. 500 bucks a year. 2000 for the whole she-bang. Don’t ask me why I didn’t get a PhD for that kind of money. I should’ve. Except I was itching to see the country and I had a 1962 Rambler and I was fed up with schooling.
Life looked like an open road, let me tell you. And … it was. For awhile. But you quit jobs the way I quit jobs, pretty soon your resume tells any prospective employer you may not stick around real long. Hard to imagine why a young buck like myself wouldn’t want to make a career out of kennel worker at the local dog pound, I know, but oddly, employers value loyalty and longevity, even if it paid $1.75 an hour back then.
And pretty soon even a will-of-the-wisp worker like myself realizes the job market is evaporating faster than the icebergs polar bears are sailing. Combine that with the less than rosy employment opportunities of the South End, you maybe can see why entrepreneurism works for some of us desperate dead end graduates. Which, looking back now from a few decades of a so-called career in art, it did. Sure, it could’ve turned out tragic. It could’ve been a cautionary tale for my friends to tell their kids. ‘You want to turn out like Skeeter, go ahead, keep flunking math in your senior year, see how you like living hand to mouth in some hellhole.” As it turns out they keep their kids away from me about the time when college applications are due. You don’t let them play with a happy artist when what they need is to buckle down and make some serious Life Decisions.
I hear a lot of talk these days that history and literature and the fine arts are a waste of time for a college to offer. Not worth the high tuition when you rank it against potential earnings. I think that kind of thinking is too sad for words. That kind of thinking is right out of the mouths of the folks with no imagination and no use for one. Speaking for those of us with ‘useless’ degrees, I can say my education didn’t end back in 1972 when I missed graduation ceremonies. What I learned was learning is a lifetime endeavor. It didn’t end with a job. It didn’t end at all. You ask me, whatever that cost, it was worth every cent.
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