You don't want to be a lawyer, you don't want to be a professor!

Wow.

There is a tremendous amount of negativity in the world. Has anyone else noticed this? I googled "steps to go to law school" and came up with about 800 websites dedicated in whole or in part to discouraging people from attending law school.

Mmmmkay. Color me crazy here (it's not hard) but isn't the SCHOOL part the important bit? It's SCHOOL, a place where you LEARN. Actually, a place where you ARE INSTRUCTED IN THE FINE ART OF LEARNING.

For instce, I was not at a bastion of intellectualism for undergrad. That's the mild, pc way of noting that I attended a rather notorious "party school." I didn't know I was signing on for a party school, but I can say definitively that I'm awfully glad I did it. I learned to party, picked up some rather fetching career options and broke out into the world utterly prepared to hijack concerts at will AND edit the hot holy hell out of a piece of writing. Most of the people I knew were of above-or-well-above average intelligence and we spent a good chunk of our time admiring the hypersmart drug dealers who were working on their MBAs and Ph.Ds in Pharmacy to truly lock down their markets. There was always someone to admire, is all I'm saying.

As I prepared to leave school there was a lot of yammering about getting a job and prospects and I'd spent 3 years already listening to quite a few of my engineering buddies predict their income upon graduation and rant about EP (earning potential) of girlfriends. Eggheads. They so totally missed the boat. They didn't have nearly as much fun in school as I did, being locked away in the E-building, which wasn't such a bad place as I spent chunks of time there trying to sneak into the chemical engineering labs and see what I could muck up, and most of them didn't find the satisfaction in those Realized Earnings as they thought they would. Many entered the world of work and found that ridiculous amounts of money were not waiting for them, however utterly stultifying workplaces were. Go figure.

I spent most of college traveling, sleeping, recreationally exploring my campus and fellow students, watching clouds cross the sky, scamming free food, writing and wandering the bowels of libraries up and down the eastern seabord. If I couldn't be found it usually wasn't because I was in class (boring!) but because I was blowing the dust off of some tome and dancing little jigs because I'd found some obscure bit of analysis that confirmed my theories on whatever (generally alice walker and toni morrison and exploration of the supernatural in literature). I came out of school making a rather obscene amount of money to do something I would have gladly volunteered to do for the same amount of time every day gratis. And they fed me.

So, now I'm ready to go back to school and it seems the whole world is anti-education. In reality, there is nothing wrong with school as long as you understand some simple rules:

1. School does not guarantee a job - you do. School is the mind, jobs (and careers) are the heart and hands. They require human capital, as in, human you show up enough and you get a job.

2. School does not make you smart - you do. At best, school gives you exposure to smart people and an outlet for learning new things. At worst, you may pick up a nasty drug habit and a brand spanking new disease. Shit happens. School, like life, is what you make of it.

3. Attending college DOES improve your chances of increased income. If you're trying to climb economic classes, school is a handy-dandy way to do it. Yes, the stuff they teach you in class is helpful, but the REAL meat is in the stuff you learn from people in economic classes you aspire to. In school, you get to be around those people, observe and make forays into foreign worlds. You get to gather the tools of assimilation. You learn the language, mannerisms, cultural touchstones - you get exposure and possible acceptance. Again, human capital.

So, this is me going back to school. I'm not going to school for another or better job. That's hogwash. I'm going back to school so that I can spend time in libraries blowing dust and to give myself a break from working full time. No shit. I want to read and learn and become mildly insensible with useless knowlege, but I also want to sharpen my analytical skills and float a bit and come out with some letters after my name.

Cause really, there are few thrills as pleasant as having letters after your name.

Happy Skoolin!