Hokay.... edumacation

This will be a sorta-kinda rant, so you may leave now.... door's in the back, don' t confuse it with the fire-exit, which is locked and against the fire laws, last I heard, but hey.... the people who own the building didn't subscribe to the fire department, so if you smoke and the place catches fire, they'll come over and watch us burn. Please refrain from smoking, ok? This won't take long...

Edumacation... hmmm... what's set me off, you'll ask. Well... hearing that some people in the occupy Wall Street movement have two degrees and still can't find jobs and are in debt... sometimes to the tune of over two hundred THOUSAND dollars. Let that sink in for a minute.

Up to two hundred THOUSAND dollars! That should qualify them for Something...

For a person my age.... it freaks me totally. I grew up believing that higher education was the only way out and maybe up. I wanted the 'out'.

And hearing that the current cost of going to Yale is 42 THOUSAND dollars a year knocked me off my seat, hey. Left me friggin' spitless. Who could AFFORD that nowadays, huh? Oh yeah, the 'elite'.

Reporters keep telling us that things began going down-hill socially thirty years ago. Nooooo... it was longer than that.

And it was ALWAYS about class. In 1968, I was a senior in high school. I went to my so-called guidance counserlor and said I wished to apply for a college. My SATS were very good, but my high school... oh lordy... the kids from the north end got the perks, and schmucks like me were just barely tolerated.

And this counselor guided his north-end kids into the best colleges in the nation. So what do you think I got?

He laughed in my face with an expression of derision on his stupid face I can't even describe. 'You? College? Forget it!'

Stupid irish git...

And I thought, 'You just wait...'

I just wasn't 'good' enough, because I didn't come from the right 'background'.

Well, the people from the right 'background' were sorta sleazy in their morals, Preciousses...

So I said, 'I'll show them, all right.'

I got put on a waiting list at UNH, and got accepted to a business college meanwhile, so I went there for a year. It was small and in the neighborhood, and looking back, really helped me for the rest of my life to know about bookkeeping, which is the driest, most horrible thing you could wish for.

I was working, it was affordable, but I had to work a LOT.

And my first semester, I made the 'dean's list'. And got mentioned in the dreaded Union Leader, the most despicable paper in the nation. Don't get me started, hey.

So, I re-applied to UNH, and wonder of wonders... I got 'accepted'. And the troubles began.

At the time, UNH was the most expensive state university in the country. The tuition for one semester was one thousand dollars. Just the tuition. At the time... in Austrian Schillings, that would have been three months pay for them. Twenty five thousand Schillings.

Just to make it clear.

So I went looking for help. A grant, a scholarship, whatever. And y'know what? Catch-22 Preciousses. The system was gamed from the get-go. 'Do you work?' 'Yes.' 'How much do you make a year?' Told em. 'Ohh, we're so sorry, you're not eligible.'

To make it clear, was in a suit and tie and short hair in 1969, but class 'tells' with such people.

And I thought, 'fine, what am I supposed to do now, starve for a year, and then they take pity on me, or something?' Was despondent.

My boss and ersatz-father Bernie took me aside, and said, 'Son, you need a loan... I will help you with your first one, that you get it. But it will be the most important thing in your life to establish good credit, and pay it back in time, so that you can get another. You'll need a second job to swing this. There is a janitor job open for one of the small cinemas, and it pays well... would you take it?' Would I? I'd have done anything...

So we went to the bank next door, and he co-signed my first loan.. I would NEVER have asked my parents to do that, and they wouldn't have, am pretty sure even now... and I was off and running. Oh, right, now I remember... I did ask, and they wouldn't have co-signed because... they'd just co-signed one for my brother to buy a car, right. Goood all ballsy 'Murka. He was 'solid', I was the 'dreamer'.

That loan only covered the cost of having the 'privilege' of attending. I don't remember HOW, but I think it was through some of my co-workers with older brothers who were in the same predicament, and I landed in a car-pool to attend lectures. We all had to schedule our classes so that we could go out there and back, and work our jobs, and not waste time waiting for anyone else.

We had to drive over fifty minutes to campus, fifty minutes back, and I was still working 80 hour weeks, so it was fucking stressful.

Youth and resiliance is a wonderful thing. What did a day in the life back then look like?

Up at six, made toast, then rushing for my ride at 6:50. The long drive to Durham in a VW Beetle I love to this day. Except for the windshield wipers. When you needed them, they didn't wanna work. The first time they wimped out, I took the cord out of my anorak, cut it in two, and we opened the vent windows, and got synchronised, having tied them to the wipers and pulling them back and forth. Dave kept taking the car in to fix it, and it was fine.... worked so well in the sunshine, but hey... if it rained or snowed? Get out the cords. Otherwise the car was a gem.

Later he had a Mustang, and it was such a lemon.

So... Durham just before eight, a run to the Mub, which was the student cafeteria, and then RUN with a huge cuppa to class with the sand not even rubbed outta my eyes.

Classes until two or so... and we met in the Mub.. and drove home... sorta in a daze.

And sometimes I slept. Then it was off to my normal work, and when the cinemas closed, I was up in the smallest one, cleaning up the mess the audience made with my vacuum cleaner and cleaning toilets till about one a.m. And ran home to sleep for four hours if the new cop on the beat didn't fuck up my routine because he didn't know me.... On the weekends, I was at work from 8 a.m. till nearly midnight. I didn't know the meaning of sleep. Studied in the car.

So you can forget all the college films about partying... I think the only thing we did that was out of the ordinary was to go to a neighboring town one day and see the otherwise banned swedish film 'I Am Curious Yellow'. I fell asleep. I think I remember two blonde people copulating on a stone fence in front of a villa, but I wouldn't swear to it...

Now at the time there was the Viet Nam war. And the draft issue. Those things never entered my mind. I was thirsting for knowledge, and a better life. I soon learned that full-idjits who had straw for brains got passed so they would be exempt. I had to WORK for my marks.

I was glad when they changed it to a lottery thing... they drew dates of birth out of a drum, and the number ones would be the first to go. Mine was very high, so there was little chance of being drafted to a war I thought was wrong. if it had been low, I would have acquiesced... not knowing that so many people in later generations got exemptions because their families were rich. Those things always have a way of being 'fixed' somehow.

After my second year, I got into a summer program for German... had changed my major from psych to that... because the psych dept. was not into what I liked at all. And German fascinated me... just from the structure and logic of the language.

So I paid yet another large tuition, having gotten a leave of abscence assent from my boss, who was the most generous man I have ever met... and got to the school only to find that I was also supposed to pay for room and board... way beyond my means.

And I thought, 'Oh gawwd, this is a nightmare...' Said I was sorry, but I didn't have the funds for it. Did they make me work for it? Uh-uh.. There was a short consultation, and Jürgen said... 'We have good news. The German government will give you a grant, you can stay.' As if it were the most normal thing in the wurrld, hey. That that was POSSIBLE...

And it was the best summer of my life. I was finally a uni student, in a dorm, and with new-made friends, and all the fun and craziness that entails, and learned what I had been missing. Because I was poor.

And still finished two semesters of intermediate German in eight weeks and got a citation as best of class at the end. And a recommendation to go to Munich to work the following summer if I wanted to do the jr. year abroad programme in Salzburg.

Which brought up the next dilemma. HOW to afford a whole year in Salzburg, even if I did find a job in Munich the summer before?

Well back then, there was something relatively new.. a government loan, hey.... low interest...

As I'd proven four times that I was a credible client, paying back one thousand dollars pro semester to get the money for the next one.... it was easy. Got it. It would be two large payments, at the beginning of the Fall Semester, and another before the second. I was all set.

I found a place and paid a year's rent in advance to the people I rented from in June. Was conscientious and didn't splurge.

But then a strange thing happened. Nixon devaluated the dollar two weeks before my second check arrived, so I only got half the value. Can we say, 'screwed over?' I had to drop out of classes and work waiting tables, and was glad to get even that. My boss was the drunk Tartar From HELL.

And my boss had to bail me out for the money to get an airline ticket home. Gawwd love him. The minute I was back and I saw him, I said, 'You KNOW you're going to get your money back asap.' And he always had this sphynx smile, and said... 'I know. Don't worry about it.'

So I sorta missed out on the edumacation part of the second semester, but got one of another sort entirely.

And there were rumblings and a new spirit was in the land.... to put it in biblical terms...

The powers that be... whoever they are... decided that if you were in high school, two years of a foreign language would no longer be a requirement to go to college.

(Huh... and I thought I'd be a teacher...)

And the bottom dropped out of the job market, and I knew people with Masters degrees who were washing dishes in restaurants just to get by, because, you know... no red-blooded 'Murkin would EVAH want to learn to speak 'ferner'..

And I began that fourth year, and had a horrendous run-in with the head of my dept. I'd spent three hours with him the Christmas before when he visited us... alone. And gave him fifteen pieces of my mind about how ill-conceived it was, and that Salzburg was not the setting to put such a programme. And he did not like me for it. (I heard they later moved it. So I was right.)

It was the second week of going with a new car pool and new debt. My dept. head was hostile. And I thought, 'Y'know what, B? This is self-defeating. Pay off your debts, and wait to see what happens', so I thought it would be a hiatus to re-coup my assets... the ones I no longer had.

I had no idea how much worse things would become.

So I re-paid all my debt in less than a year, which was good. And things became worse in the job market, which was bad... And that was the end of my 'edumacation'.

No one I know from my class back then ever became a teacher... which says a lot.

On my home front, things went from bad to worse, and I finally said, 'ok, am outta here... debt free, have a bit of money... I'm getting OUT.

Compared to these Occupy people today... I can count my blessings that I had it EASY. The banks weren't the completely soulless sharks they've become today. HOW are these poor young people going to ever find their way to land again?

Everything about all this is WRONG, and pepper spraying those 'lazy' students like cockroaches when they protest tuition going up AGAIN? It just doesn't add up to me....

So what did I learn in my edumacation? I learned to think critically, read analytically, and a language. Not much bang for the buck. And that the privileged always get the free rides and a golden ticket to a job they aren't suited for, and that vitaman C (connections) wins out every single time. Not what is in someone's head. Or their potential.

And ya haveta think... this was nearly forty years ago.

The way it is now horrifies me.

The difference here? There is no tuition unless you aren't Austrian, and then it it pitifully low. They did introduce one for locals for a while, but the outrage was so ginormous, they rescinded it. Of course there are costs for boarding, and so on. But they aren't nearly NEARLY so prohibitive. I inscribed one semester at the beginning, hoping to finish my BA. It was really inexpensive. But there was a problem. I had swing shifts, and would have missed half the lectures, and soon learned it was a losing battle. Besides which, who would have wanted an American-born German teacher?

Reality BITES....

I had some enormously impressive teachers here, and attended some lectures that left me spitless.. My all-time favourite was my friend G dragging me to his anatomy class. He was just starting out, and the professor was so demanding, they feared him. But the guy was a first-class showman. He'd bring in his 'presents' for show and tell... covered with a towel in a porcelain tray....

Once it was an arm minus the epidermis. 'Don't let this disappoint you. With a living arm, it's much rosier, and juicier.' Another it was the arm-bone attached to the shoulder bone, and he demonstrated how it can become dislocated... gutwrenchingly true-to life. And the students got to study the raised nodules on the upper arm bone, which all have names... really.

He was dramatic... but fucking effective.

G. tried to scare me. He said, 'Oh, we have to go down here.' Into a cellar. I said, 'Hokay'. And it was the dissection room, lots of live corpses, some with or without the epidermis. And all these students working on them, studying.

G. was certain I would faint or something. I don't think anyone could have disappointed him more. I said, 'OH! It's like 'the visible man', we used to have these models where yóu could see all the muscles, and the veins and arteries and the nerves... it's sorta coool. So this is where you study?'

Left him speechless.

Things like that are an education. No one needs to spend 42000 dollars a year for some asshat to fill their heads with junk they aren't ever going to be able to use.... or hardly.

You can leave the room now. Done.