Here I am in my mid forties, sitting all alone in my home office and drinking beer and watching old video games for the Dreamcast console. I have spent the whole day on Twitter, avoiding my chores, projects, and hobbies. The first of April is coming and a huge decision looms over me – do I enroll in a high school course towards completing my OSSD? Do I try a third time even though I had to withdraw from class the previous two times? Do I want to admit that I’m such a big loser that I couldn’t even finish high school by trying, once again, to do what the rest of you did in your teenage years?
When I was a teenager, it was the mid-’90s and life was grand. I lived in North York (Toronto) and loved every single thing I did. My hobbies included learning Slackware 1.0 (Linux), programming in C++, downloading warez (games), and composing music in trackers in DOS. High school at the time offered programming in boring Turing, biology, chemistry and physics and geography – who cares! What a bore! Studying covalent bonds, whatever those were, didn’t seem half as interesting as how to get LILO (pre-GRUB) configured on my 386sx-16mhz machine with 4mb of RAM. Before long I was skipping classes.
It got to the point where my Calculus teacher asked me why I skipped 80 of 88 classes that year. I had no answer, I just told him math didn’t interest me. This wasn’t the real truth, for I loved calculus. But what was I going to say to him? Gee, learning from a blackboard and paper and pen is lame and computers are the future? Everyone who was smart knew that Linux would be the future. Back then we didn’t have Google, or books at the library, so I had to learn everything the hard way. Through trial and error. I had to use the man pages a lot, too. There weren’t forums the way there are now, and there definitely wasn’t AI nor experts I could collaborate with. Everything I had to learn by changing one line at a time with plenty of print statements, and this held true for configuration files as well as source code compiling.
Many years later, after I had dropped out of high school and got a job in Toronto’s tech industry I would excuse my bad decision of leaving high school by saying there simply wasn’t enough time. And it was easy enough to buy into this illusion. I first noticed my faulty thinking when I explained this lack of time to my grandma. I told her my daily activities included hanging out with friends, rollerblading, coding, writing music, and playing with Linux. My grandma looked at me stunned, and she said that I was wrong in how I looked at things. She reminded me of her experience in high school during World War II! She had to take a train to school, not a subway. And at that it was a cargo train, without seating. She had to do homework, but also house work to help with the family, she had to cook, sew, clean, etc. I never did any of this. All I ever did was sit and stared at a computer screen. When I thought about it seriously, what my grandma said made sense. Except I was listening to it 25-30 years after the fact. She said I had time for both, school and personal projects, just like she did back in the ‘40s.
This was difficult for me to accept. I had always told everyone as well as myself that I was following in the footsteps of giants like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates – dropouts who made it big in tech. I felt I had made it big, too. In my 20s I was making more money than those who finished university and had “wasted their lives earning a piece of paper” – as I used to explain. This of course wasn’t the reality. When I was a teenager my parents divorced. And a way I dealt with that was by imbuing myself into computers. I would put on my headphones and stare at the screen doing work and so it was a form of escapism or avoidant behaviour. Going to school meant having to deal with realities at home, which clearly I didn’t want to do. Writing music was more fun than studying chemistry or biology or physics even, but I had time for both. I could have had my mom help me at the dinner table after dinner for an hour every day! I could have done my home work, passed my exams, and still composed all the music I wanted. I would have still had time to hang out with friends and play video games with my sisters. My grandma was right. I lacked time management skills. I was also poorly coping with the family situation.
Oddly enough there were no councillors calling my parents when I skipped class. My parents never talked to me about my missing of classes either. I don’t recall my dad ever asking me why I was home and working on Linux instead of at school. There was never a moment when a teacher asked me why I wasn’t showing up. I did still attend high school, but only the classes I liked. I would show up for lunch hour to hang out with friends, and gym was always what I was in. I sometimes attended economics as that interested me. I naturally thought tech would lead me towards running my own business. None of it ever materialized. THe lack of organizational skills I failed to learn in school lead towards a disorganized adult life. I had plenty of success in the tech world, but whenever something complex was asked of me I avoided it and skipped out. There were moments I even skipped out on work whenever a presentation was required of me. I got fired for it, too.
I guess all I’m trying to say is that this April I’ll be enrolling in high school classes as an adult. I have to admit to myself that for thirty something years I have been living wrongly. I have been pursuing things the wrong way, walking along the wrong path. I will need maybe five or six credits to graduate. I’m not looking forward to any of this. But it is time to set things right. It is time to finish high school. I believe my grandma was right. I believe I still have time for everything.
Thousandth Cloud 