Don't need no education

James and I were having fancy cheese at Otto on Sunday night when I realized that I'd forgotten a lot of things that happened in college. For one thing, I'd somehow forgotten that James had also been an RA until we started trading ridiculous on-duty stories. Even though both of us have been certified Grown-Up People for some time now (haha - no, really, we have jobs and debt and stuff), it's a little bizarre we manage to find bottomless nostalgia in talking about When We Were In School. You know, back in the day. It feels like another life. A life where I wore messenger bags exclusively and had an unfortunate taste for Smirnoff Ice.

At some point in the last few years, I stopped being on academic time. (I also gave up Smirnoff Ice, but somehow that seems less sad.) For most of my life, this would be the time of year when I would actually start to pine for school. Even for a long time after I graduated, I would still find myself conditioned to think of late summer as time to get ready for...something. Then I realized that after Labor Day I still had to go to the same job, sit at the same desk and order the same chopped liver sandwich for Steve. Oh, and make my student loan payment on the 8th of the month. Fantastic.

I was really good at school. And I mean that in the way that some people are really good at video games - all I cared about was getting the High Score on my transcript, getting to the next level, killing the big boss with my super-combo move. OK, maybe not the last part. But when I think about it now, I wasn't terribly concerned with, you know, learning anything. I'm sure I absorbed a few things here and there - I will spell you under the table, for example, thanks to reading about the exploits of Flavia and company in 11th grade Latin. It was like The Hills of ancient Rome, only with more conjugating of the verbs. ANYWAY. Much like how mastering Gears of War doesn't have much residual benefit to your everyday life, my gift for deftly navigating the hurdles of secondary education didn't actually make me a more knowledgeable person now that my value as a human is more than my cumulative GPA.

By the time I got to college, manipulation of the academic system was almost second nature. I knew exactly the bare minimum of effort I needed to put in and still satisfy my need to overachieve. I seemed to have an eerie ability to churn out term papers in the 11th hour - I would almost go into some sort of trance (no, seriously) and spew words and hope that I was making a rational point somewhere in there. It was a game of chicken to see what I could get away with, how much I could coast on my innate intelligence.

I remember being handed back an essay I had written for my 20th Century American Literature class - an essay I had finished approximately 2 hours before it was due on two books I had not actually read, only skimmed for quotes. Oh, and it was about 3 pages shy of the minimum required length. I got an A. That was the moment at which I realized that I was effectively minoring in Complete Bullshit. As a matter of fact, if bullshit had been a real choice of major (it probably was at Gallatin), it would have prepared me much more effectively for my chosen line of work.

After I got home from dinner with James, I had a text exchange with the tour manager for one of my bands.

"It's good to be off the road," he said. "But I'm not exactly looking forward to going back to school."

Compared to spending weeks in a van with a bunch of hungover, unshowered dudes?

College - it really is much better in retrospect.