Thirty Day Challenge: Day Fifteen

Current Grades

Ummmm...yeah. This one does not compute. I'm long past things like "grades". Isn't it funny, though, how unimportant grades can seem once you're far enough removed from school? That awful grade I got one period in Ninth Grade English sure doesn't seem nearly as important now as the teacher tried to make it seem back then. (And besides, I am still convinced is because she lost a paper I handed in, and in any event, she didn't even mention that she "hadn't received my paper" until well after the final grade for that period was submitted -- that's when that particular teacher earned her spot on my Eternal Teacher Shit List.)

If I'd had better grades, would I have a "better" life right now? Maybe, but maybe not. Maybe with better grades I get into a "better" college, or maybe I get to go to grad school on a fellowship (I was accepted to a number of grad schools, but none offered assistance, and I was not terribly interested in accruing massive amounts of debt for a Ph.D. in philosophy, so I decided not to walk through that door). But then, maybe I don't meet The Future Wife. Maybe I don't decide that I like writing a lot. Maybe I don't learn to work with my hands when I'm in my 30s and have never worked with my hands before. Maybe I have a job where I'm working 60 hours a week and thus don't learn to cook. Maybe I don't read Guy Gavriel Kay, Stephen King, Christopher Moore; maybe I don't rediscover Shakespeare and Tennyson.

With better grades, maybe I'm just another person who saw college as "job training" and who demonstrated contempt and disinterest for anything I didn't think I'd need to know about "in real life". And anyway, it's not like I was a crap student, either; I was in the top 15 in my graduating class in high school and graduated college cum laude. I just didn't buy into enough of the BS to push harder, and I can't say that I regret any of that.