I didn�t finish because I hated it. I grew quickly tired of being told that, essentially, I was too smart for the classes I was taking, while my peers were being upbraided for not knowing how to properly structure a sentence. I know I�m smart without anyone telling me so. It�s in the way I speak, the way I carry myself, the way I can participate in conversations with those years my senior and college educated without feeling like a dullard. I knew then as I know now that that piece of paper I would have been receiving didn�t mean I�d be doing what I loved once I had it in my mitts. It meant merely that I would have to join the rat race, if later than those who didn�t go to college, just like every one else. Wanting to live the dream of writing for a living would not have been made any easier. I�d still be sitting here unemployed or, worse, waiting tables in double shifts to pay for my overpriced apartment. I would not have found my soul mate and I would be putting myself on display in the meat market that is the dating scene, allowing the leering eyes of unworthy men to size me up, stare through me.

Luke and I have agreed that we probably would not have endured had we been forced to carry on a long distance relationship. 1,000+ miles was simply too painful. Love gets diluted throughout the miles, thoughts stray to the what-ifs, and you wonder if you can get away with numbing the ache of missing by letting the hands of others roam your body in drunken sloppy nights. I would rather the middle ground of nesting and content I have now to anything else. He was an opportunity I knew I couldn�t let slip by.

I see people with college degrees applying for the same low-end jobs I am looking for now. The job market simply cannot accommodate everyone. Luke works with hordes of college graduates, degrees in art history, business, and marketing abound. They are bitter, too, feeling that their time and money were wasted only to end up working in a bookstore making $8.50 an hour instead of doing their dream job for three times that. They are rightfully enraged, having been told that if they spent so many years and so many thousands of dollars paying to go to school, they would come out on top, gilded.

I didn�t start college because I wanted to; I did it because I was told I should. Guidance counselors, teachers, parents, friends, all saying that I had to go to college, that it would make my life so much better. So, I picked one school, the one my stepmom had gone to, the one I had spent so much time in as a young child, the one I knew I wouldn�t have to worry about getting into, knowing that they couldn�t turn me down. I waded through the application and the FAFSA. I dutifully attended the two day, overnight orientation while my dad was in the hospital with possible heart trouble, choosing to go to my cold, grey, cinderblock walled room and read instead of forcing myself to mingle with the C-averagers hanging out at the pizza party downstairs. They liked Britney Spears and thought me alien because I read for fun, while I used words too big for them to understand and was fastidious about pronouncing my Rs.

While the wide availability of higher education is a blessing, it also means that as long as you have enough money, it doesn�t matter how intelligent you are, how easy academics come to you. You can sit through high school picking your nose, smoking pot between classes, and failing every class ever designed and still get into a university. Just as long as Mommy and Daddy can pay the $30,000 a year tuition and keep you in Abercrombie and Fitch, the world is supposedly yours, even though you don�t give a rat�s ass about broadening your horizons. All you know is that college is where you drink yourself into the toilet bowl and fuck a different hot chick every night. You consider only the top party schools, knowing that is where all your brethren go, flocking to Girls Gone Wild U.

I guess I�m tired of the upper-middle class habit of taking until there�s nothing left, whether they�re worthy or not. Don�t call me jealous; call me an intellectual elitist snob. I�ve lived both the upper-middle life and well below the poverty line. While upper-middle is good, it�s so focused on things, new cars, new toasters, and fashionable clothes, while still claiming that enough money isn�t being made. $6,000 in a checking account isn�t sufficient and you tell the IRS that despite making an additional $4,000 or more per month, you simply cannot afford to pay their $1,000 bill. Bullshit. You become more interested in your earning potential than you are in the well being of your children. Fuck that.

Just because money is available to someone, doesn�t make him or her superior to one who has to check couch cushions for rent money. Intellect, being of limited availability, should carry a higher value and proving that money is available shouldn�t be a prerequisite to employment. Intelligence and the ability to work hard are what employers want in the end. Having attended college to matriculation is a testament to neither.