Melony Louise's Natural Habitat

I'm beginning to bore of the implications that high school drop outs will never do anything with their lives ever beyond wash dishes, serve food, and give "smarter" people their change after a nice pricey shopping spree.

My mother is simultaneously a high school drop out and one of the smartest people I've ever met. I don't mean to say that solely because she's my mother, either. Often when we talk she shows me a new view of things. And yes she did wait tables for a long time, but she was also a real estate agent for several years until many things came into play that forced her to leave the business. And now she's back in community college, working for a transfer to Sac State and an art major, with plans of starting a business.

My father was a high school graduate. And although he is a smart man as well, he did also waste many years of his life in drug dealing, womanizing, and lots of the things people did to kill time in the sixties and seventies. Now he's blindly committed to a job that he would have been able to get if he was a homeless druggie with ten kids [hell, this is a good description of one co-worker he actually has] and he's said on a couple occasions how high school was a massive waste of his time.

And despite being a high school graduate myself [and an early one at that], I have to agree. I had it dawn on me recently that a college-bound person doesn't need to spend so much as one day in high school. In the four years it would take to get a diploma, you can go to a community college, get an associates in whatever interests you, and get all the required transfer units needed to go where ever you want. And how much better it would look too; "I'm eighteen in my fourth year of community college and I'm transferring to a university in the fall!" People would be killing each other to hire you. I do factor in the concept of things probably being learned a bit more difficultly, what with skipping an entire four grades, but there are so many tutoring programs, at least at American River, that with a will there's a way.

Also, the concept of a teenager needing to socialize with people their own age is crap. My friends at ARC right now are between the ages of twenty and ... late twenties. People talk to me for a while, get to know me, and then are totally surprised when they are informed of how young I am because I look and interact with people with more maturity than that. At least, so others claim, I think I'm a total immature pervert, rofl.

Anyway, my rant ends there.