Don’t Go to College: From the Beginning
Hi readers. I see you have the internets.
This is page that brings you my whole “DGTC” series from the beginning. I will add to this each week.
Enjoy.
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I want to tell you a story. Some of it is true. Some of it is based on personal experience. A few of the characters are based on people I have met. A lot of it is bullshit. I want you to be keenly aware of that. Bear with me.
This is the story of how I came to the point where I am today. It is a semi-harsh criticism of the current prevailing attitudes about education, fulfillment, and the American dream. It is about expectations and disappointment and, ultimately, disillusion. This cutting critique is interspersed with a chronological account of my travels through Central America.
Some of it is funny. Some of it isn’t. More than a little bit of it is bittersweet and depressing. There is a fair amount of cursing in it because the emotions experienced (and re-experienced through self-examination) merit something more than cheap euphemism. Sorry mom.
I originally wrote this piece because I had grand illusions that I was going to turn it into a book and revitalize the idealism and individuality that made America great. Then I read this article, which forced me to laugh at how ridiculously cliched that would have been.
After a little soul-searching and a fair amount of waffling, I decided to share it anyhow. I will continue to write and post as usual my random musings. These installments will update every Wednesday. I encourage you to comment and participate so that we can create a forum to voice our dissatisfaction with the status quo and create an environment of challenging the norms and working toward a more ideal life.
Friends and family, I give you the first installment of: Don’t Go to College
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Fuckfuckfuckfuck. Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck. FUCK! Fuck me. What the fuck am I doing. This is the type of thing that people who know what they’re DOING do. Not me. Who the hell do I think I am?
This is what was going through my head on the plane. My one way plane. To Guatemala City.
I was paying for false bravado. Scared shitless.
I hadn’t really made any plans as to what I was going to do once I got there. I had spent the previous weeks and months blissfully putting off thinking about it and basking in the adulation of those who I imagined were enamored with my dash. When asked what my plans were by friends and family, I’d adopt my best conquistador stance, squint into the distance, and reply, “The plan is to not have a plan.”
Yeah it sounds stupid to me as well. I had chosen Guatemala City because the ticket was only $150 dollars. In hindsight, this should have been a warning.
Oh, I’d gone and bought a travel guide for Central America. I just hadn’t cracked it. I was frantically rifling through it under the amused gaze of the Guatemalan couple next to me.
“Adonde vas?” they asked. I wanted to scream, “I have no fucking clue. I’m going to some country where I’m going to die or get lost. I’ll be the missing white kid all over the news. Move over Natalie Holloway. Except I’m not a pretty blond girl. I’m a short, stubby dude with a pathetic travel beard. Not exactly Fox News material. Oh dammit I’m so screwed.”
“No se,” I replied philosophically, with a faraway look. Apparently my come-what-may façade was still holding up. Of course I didn’t fucking know where I was going. I was still operating on my no-plan plan.
I offered them my guide book. The pages were freshly damp from my palms. They proceeded to offer me what was probably sound advice in rapid Spanish. Unfortunately, I had exhausted most of my grasp of the language with my two word response. I made noises of approval and astonishment.
I actually felt a little better after my conversation with the Guatemalans.
Fuck oh fuck why am I on this plane.
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The path that led me to buy that one way ticket actually started in high school, I think. As a semi-overachiever, I wanted to get into the best university possible. Looking back, I really only wanted to get into a good school so I could prove to everyone that I was as smart as I thought I was.
I guess that came from middle school then, so let’s start back there. I wasn’t very cool or popular. In fact, I was distinctly uncool and unpopular, and suffered the common afflictions associated with those qualities. Luckily, I left my little private middle school behind and went to a big public high school. My older sister was already cool there, so I figured if I kept my mouth shut and kept my head down, I might be considered cool as well. Gods above but did my scheme work! I played a couple of sports, sat at the cool table at lunch, and wore t-shirts that cleverly displayed alcohol products. My stock was rising. By my careful calculations, I was somewhere near the middle/bottom of the cool kids hierarchy. A self-styled sub-lieutenant of popularity.
Now, how to improve my position. I’m not the best athlete, nor the best looking. I know: I’ll be the smart guy. Honestly, it wasn’t hard. Middle school was more difficult than this high school. I sold sodas at lunch to pay for our physics trip to Six Flags and didn’t bring a gun to school. Piece of cake.
Well, I got into a good university. Take that everyone. Now you know I’m smarter than you. I can now become a superior brand of asshole. Can’t I get some sort of tattoo so that everyone immediately knows I’m smarter? No? Ok, I’ll just try to insert that little factotum into every conversation instead.
Why does this lead to me freaking out on a plane on my way to a third world country? Read on.
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My plane landed in Guatemala City. From the little I read about it in the guidebook, I was likely to get kidnapped or murdered before I could see much of the city. The no-plan plan was starting to piss me off. It was supposed to be a platform from which my dashing adventures would launch. I was supposed to survive by my wits and rippling muscles, with many an exotic woman by my side. Instead I was hyperventilating and sweating in an unconditioned airport terminal.
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Right.
I got into a good university. Ok, now what? Time to learn, right? Well, I have several options here. Shall I try to find something that inspires me? Something that I can become passionate about? Well, let’s think: my passions include reading, math, and physics. Three subjects that I actually get excited about and can spend happy hours studying.
This is naturally a very difficult decision for every neophyte collegian. So, after serious contemplation, I enthusiastically sold out. Most college freshman either (a) choose what they think their parents want them to do, (b) choose what will be the easiest path through college with the least work, or (c) choose what will make them the most money out of college. Very few decide on majors that they will enjoy. And who can blame them? I certainly wasn’t mature enough to make that kind of decision when I was 18. I’m 27 and I still giggle maniacally at my roommates’ farts. But I digress.
I chose the third option. I was going to be a financial genius and make a shit ton of loot. I would be a millionaire by the time I was thirty. This, it follows, would get me a lot of women. I would find time on the weekends to spend said loot and fondle said women.
Little did I know that business degrees will typically earn you a sweet middle management position for most of your life, contemptuous of those below you and despising your superiors. The best you can hope for is a bloated sense of self-importance.
I don’t know when we convinced ourselves that we can spend 75% of our time working at an unfulfilling job and be happy just because in the remaining 25% we can spend more money. This is a myth that I completely bought into. I was marginally interested in finance. It had a little math and a little economics, both subjects I enjoy. I quickly found out that it is extremely difficult to immerse yourself in something that you’re marginally interested in.
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I saw a cabbie with a sign. Antigua. “What the hell is an Antigua?” was my first thought.
I consulted my guide book. An Antigua turned out to be a supposedly charming colonial town about an hour from the airport. Guatemala City vs. Antigua. Death and dismemberment vs. Baroque architecture.
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Don’t get me wrong. Middle management is great for most people. I’m just hoping that there’s something better in store for me.
Things have become too easy for us. Moderate wealth is easily attainable. Our parent’s generation was obsessed with not being poor. Our generation won’t be poor. Oh we’ll have good times and bad, but ultimately, none of us will starve. Most of us will have big ass televisions. Where does this leave us? What do we strive for? Fulfillment? Hardly.
I become ill whenever the purchasing of a house is referred to as the “American Dream.” I’m sure at one point owning a home was actually an accurate symbol of the American Dream. Maybe it meant that you had bettered yourself enough to be able to become a homeowner: a rarity, an owner of land. Now it’s easy to make yourself part of the new bastardized American dream. All you have to do is saddle yourself with 40 years worth of debt. Which at some point you’re likely not going to be able to pay. You become enslaved by this debt. You can’t take chances. You can’t start your own business and leave the drudgery of your current job that pays the bills and leaves you empty. Security is your number one priority. This strikes me as the antithesis of the American dream. But that’s just me.
Most college graduates are bargain hunters of life choices. Standing in lines of patient ambition to feed at the trough of middle management. If I sacrifice five years of my life at this many hours a week, I can sustain a certain level of materialism or stability. Our generation has become the Clark Griswold of life planning: boisterous and enthusiastic to reach to the Wally World that, at its core, is ultimately empty, shut down, and tacky.
A friend once recounted to me a conversation she had with her mother. She, as most of us do at one point (or continually), was struggling with her job. It wasn’t exceptionally difficult or burdensome, she said. She just wasn’t happy doing it. Her mother told her that sometimes there are more important things in life than being happy. She quit her job the next day. Mom’s years of trading her own dreams for happiness, stability and societal norms of success had jaded her to the point where personal fulfillment was just another casualty.
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I jumped into the shuttle for Antigua and an hour later was dumped in the middle of the main square. This is where I think I finally stopped sweating. Metaphorically. Physically, I was still pouring sweat. It was around 1000 degrees there…Celsius.
I consulted the guidebook and chose the hostel with the most ridiculous name: Jungle Party. I picked my way through charming Antigua and arrived at the hostel. I had to shout through locked bars that looked stout enough to repel charging rhinos to gain entrance. I later learned that this hostel had been the victim of a recent heist. Apparently masked gunmen swept in and held around 40 guests and workers at gunpoint while they robbed them blind. A month after I left, the hostel was robbed again, presumably by the same gang, in spite of the gate and armed security guard. The rhinos never showed.
At this point in my travels, however, I was blissfully unaware of any trouble. This turned out to be a providential theme in my journey. I was always just ahead or just behind some sort of crime. At the end of my trip, I had traveled with a knifing victim, two bus jacking victims, and one pistol whipping victim, not to mention countless theft-ees. My solitary great tragedy was a stolen iPod that I left on a restaurant table overnight. It was blind luck that things turned out as well as they did for me. It certainly had nothing to do with any sort of special wherewithal on my part.*
As I bumbled along in Antigua, grinning like an idiot, drinking the water (replete with delicious and exotic component micro-organisms), and sampling the finest food each market stall had to offer (oh streetmeat… shall we ever cross paths again?), I fell in with some travelers.
Travelers are naturally herd creatures and crave the approval of others. I was no exception. And at this point I was starting to fancy myself a true traveler. After all, I had shrewdly maneuvered my way to this beautiful colonial town in Guatemala that I had never heard of. Who cares that five hours earlier I was in the Atlanta airport munching on a Cinnabon? I was practicing my facial expressions of deep contemplation and cultural understanding. I probably just looked constipated.
The question was: where to next? I had no clue. I had gotten myself somewhere, now I needed to get myself somewhere else… somehow.
* My strategy, if confronted by any sort of criminal, was to squeal like a woman and then proceed to scream “Not in the face! Not in the face!”
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So I hunkered down to become a financial genius. And by hunkered down I mean I did a moderate amount of work and a significant amount of partying. After all, I had just proved myself cool in high school. Shouldn’t I be cool in college? My abercrombie wardrobe sure thought so…
I was semi-serious about my studies. In my second year, I decided to spend a semester abroad in Barcelona. It was the closest I got to actually utilizing the great gift of higher education. It spit me out of my comfort zone and away from the (in my case) developmentally atrophying environment of a small private school. I studied art, history, literature, language, and, to appease my future financier-persona, international business.
I cringe internally when I look back at this juncture in my life. This could have been a turning point for me. Never were subjects that I embraced and loved so starkly juxtaposed with subjects that I thought I would grow to enjoy but secretly despised.
People are always convincing themselves that they really love things that they don’t. I once met a guy who said his passion was manufacturing or supply chain management or something like that. I quietly excused myself, strapped on roller skates, and kicked him in the mouth. Show me someone who says they are enthralled by logistics and I will show you a liar. At best, they are interested in it or find it stimulating. The word love is too lightly used, particularly when it comes to vocation.
After my semester in Barcelona, I came back to my little comfort nest. Except now I was different. I had been abroad*. I was distinguished from my peers in a way that I couldn’t describe and others couldn’t fathom. I began every third sentence with, “Well, in Barcelona…” I can’t imagine how annoying I was. This is something that I still find myself guilty of. Throw a couple pints in me, and I will find a way to mention my travels while insinuating that I’m probably the smartest guy in the bar. It’s horribly embarrassing.
* If I could italicize this any more, I would. Extra slanty.
Hi I'm David. I'm horrendously unphotogenic, so this is as close as you get! Cheers!