I wish the option of going to college didn't exist.

Seriously. I am so sick of the pressure to go to school. I'm not exactly sure where it's coming from but I think it's from somewhere between my parents and Tim Yates' firm belief that not going to college would be a huge mistake. I was reading a book tonight at Borders about twenty-somethings and the directions they take in their lives, and not once did I read a story about someone who didn't go to college. When I was in Des Moines at POG to play the piano for Celebrate Recovery I had at least ten people ask me "How's school going?" People act like it's just a given that you'll go - like it's the next in line after birth, childhood, puberty, highschool then BAM! I felt guilty telling them that I hadn't started. Guilty. Why in the name of all that is schoolasic should I feel guilty? I moved to a city without a job or money and I'm getting on my feet. That wasn't unexpected - I knew that I was basically jumping into the deep end of the swimming pool.

Every day I work with people who went to college and now they have really boring jobs. They sit at their desks and they work in their little applications and do reports and memorize pi to hundreds of digits for all I know. I'm sure their work is boring because I they spend all day on their computers and I know what is on their computers. All their applications are dull and lifeless, with names like "CRC Reports" and "Statistica 7.1". Pretty much all these programs do is display huge lists of numbers and letters on the screen...and most of these people have gone to college. Is that what college gets you? A safe, boring, soul-destroying job crunching numbers in a florescently-lit hellhole with the occasional water cooler break and company Holiday Celebration?

On the other hand, I don't want to be like the guys who walk up to me on the street or while I'm pumping gas and ask me for money. They don't look like they bathe too often, and they certainly don't smell like it. And many times their teeth are missing. Now, this could be from playing hockey without a mask but I'm going to venture a guess that the root cause of their poor dental status is lack of money. And almost every person that I respect in my life has told me (more or less) that I'm going to end up like Mr. Please Sir Do You Have A Dollar To Spare? on the street if I neglect to basically bury myself in debt and enroll myself at the institution of education of my choosing. (Higher education, by the way, is what allows me to ascertain that the previous sentence was a run-on. Bite me.)

But I'm really having a hard time deciding if this is the path that I want to take. Sure, college is great for losing huge amounts of money and sleep and possibly your virginity and having long midnight discussions about special relativity. But when all is said and done, and you're out the money that you spent and filling out six bagjillion applications to various places of employment you realize that college is not so much a free ticket into $50,000 a year with a corner office and an executive assistant as it is a little piece of paper that hangs on your wall that nobody cares about. Well, maybe some people do, but they wear power ties and drive BMWs and I care not about such things.

Which brings me to the one guy who said "college is useless, get experience". I keep fluctuating between thinking he's a genius, and thinking he hates me and gave me that advice because he wants me to fail. By and large the people in the industry that I want to get into do not have pretty papers with college letterheads on them, but what does that really say? A lot of the ones that I've met are very young, and it is quite within the realm of possibility that not having any kind of higher education will hurt them in the long run. When the tour is over, and the band has gone home and truck is packed, will anybody give them a job? Of course, Chris says "Sure, gear manufacturers love tour guys." But that's conjecture and I doubt that he has done the research to back up this claim in any kind of concrete way.

All this to say: I am tired of the college "question". I just want to run away and find a quiet place where I won't have to think about school and SATs and GPAs and STDs and GOPs and CIAs. Anyways, by all accounts I should have started thinking about it a long time before now - a high school student I am friends with told me that she is spending a lot of time looking at college to go to - and she doesn't even have her driver's license yet. Heck, Thim has been to Cambridge and he's like sixteen! It's like I'm looking at a crossroads, and one of them is marked "Abandon all hope, ye who enter" but I'm not sure which one is the college road and which one is the "work your butt off at the sound company of your choosing" road. Maybe both would be good, maybe both would be disastrous. It sucks not knowing.

Exit, stage left. Sparks