Musings

As I sit here waiting for yet another batch of cookies to come out of the oven, my mind jumps from one unrelated topic to another. (My brain tends to do that to me, when I'm not focused on something else.)

For instance, I was outside having a cigarette and I got to thinking about some of the things I learned while I was in college. I learned that you cannot mail TeddyGrahams. I sent one to my mother along with a letter I had written. When it arrived, she asked me why I had sent her dirt. I learned that flies land on the ceiling by hovering, attaching their front two legs and shifting the rest of the body around. I learned that I have no idea how they manage to cut hot dog buns down the center and still have them all stick together. I don't remember much of my education at that fine institution. (Somedays I don't remember much of anything, but that's a subject for another entry.) Not that it wasn't a great school; it was. It's just that some of the most inane things were, for me, the most memorable.

I went to Northern Michigan University (on the sunny shores of Lake Superior) for four years, and still managed to leave without securing a degree. When I first arrived, I was fired up to learn. I spent my whole first year studying my brains out. Then I discovered a social life, and everything went to hell in a handbasket. My awesome first year GPA was the only thing that kept me from being kicked out over the next three years. But then the scholarship ran out. I wasted a rather large sum of money and managed to learn almost nothing. Sometimes the things we do when we are young are the things we kick ourselves in the butt for decades later.

This isn't a morality tale. It's just a fact. If a young mind happens to wander across this and learns from my experiences, great. If not, no biggie. I'm a firm believer that you can lead a man to knowledge but you can't make him think.