The best laid plans of mice and men . . .

And this is why I abhor trying to plan anything.  I don't even like to plan things the day before.  Because usually, the plans fall through.  Which is exactly what happened.

I've been trying to get this school thing together since February.
 I'm a terrible procrastinator, so I tried to keep that in mind once I had made the decision to return to school, something I said I would never do again. I thought everything would be finalized three weeks ago, but then I was sent on a paperwork hunt for the next week and a half.  I did finally get my transcript up to the admissions office today and plan on taking the COMPASS test tomorrow.  My original plan had included handling all this on Monday, but since my silly, silly fiancee broke his hand in the wee Sunday hours, I've been taking care of him ever since.  Can't leave a right handed guy with a broken right hand all on his own, especially since it's his first broken bone.  And we gamers really get depressed when we lose the use of a hand, as having both is crucial to both controller holding and mouse/keyboard manipulation.  But he's doing okay.

So, back to this Five Year Plan thing.  Here we go, putting it down on digital paper.  It's said that words have power, so I'm hoping these words will give me some.  So here we go, words, do your stuff.  These are the things I want to accomplish in the next five years:

Graduate from SCC, with my Associate's Degree in Administrative Office Technology with Legal Electives

Graduate from SCC Magna Cum Laude, and as Validictorian of my degree program

Gain employment as  Paralegal with at least a $30k a year salary, plus benefits

Buy a car of my very own

Learn to pilot a motorcycle, and get my motorcycle license

Buy a house and move out of our current living situation

Stop smoking

Learn to use Photoshop CS6 properly

Brush up on my German

Finish my right arm tattoo sleeve

So, there it is.  Stupid?  Probably.  But I don't care what you think, this isn't for you.  It's for me.  The the theoretical audience presented me via blog is enough to help make me feel responsible for achieving my Five Year Plan goals.  As you can see, I don't reach very far.  I'm the last person I would consider a "hard worker", because all the years of hard work I've put in have netted me exactly zilch (I'm actually indebted to said hard work), so I really don't see the point of over-exerting yourself for anything, as nothing will come of it but unnecessary exhaustion.  I even found out today that the English 101 credit I busted my butt to earn in high school won't count because I took it over five years ago.  Not to mention that my first freshman year of college, I took English 102.  So yeah, lot of fat good that hard work did.  Hard work has never gotten me ahead in life or my career, though I've watched plenty of other people just skim by (usually taking credit for my hard work) and receive accolades and plaudits for their menial effort.  So fuck all this "go the extra mile" bullshit.  I call that being taken advantage of.  And yes, I ended that sentence in a preposition.  Because I felt like it.

The list is in no particular order, and many of its parts allow for the others to come to fruition.  But priority numero uno on that list is to graduate.  And I'm not even sure I can go to school yet.  Without that financial barrier being breached, the entire list is moot.  My giving them my Official High School Transcript (because it is very Important!) so that my FAFSA stuff can be finalized.  Or something.  I think they just like to poke fun at what idiots most of us were in high school.  I honestly thought my final grades were better than those listed on the stamped and sealed printout from the district office.  It kind of hurt my feelings to look at those letters and realize they represented me.  I ***HATED*** school.  School is where I learned to mistrust authority.  

Beginning in my very early years in 4K kindergarten as a three year old.  At a private Christian school no less.  I don't remember the teachers' names.  The first woman we had was a dear, but she left to teach in the public school system after about six weeks or so after school's start.  The next teacher was a demon.  The only image of her in my head is of a rotund, tallish woman with black poofy hair (reminds me of Mrs. Kay on Duck Dynasty) looming over me in a medical green dress with a white round collar and four little white round buttons.  She like to pick on me because I was a year younger than the other kids.

The class was coloring one day, and my three year old mind liked green the best.  I would grasp the fat green crayon in my little three year old fist and would scribble in dark vertical lines until the page was filled with the lovely color.  I loved green.  That awful woman came and snatched my paper out from under me, and held it up for the class to see.

"Look at this!" she exclaimed, brandishing the paper, "Look how ugly this is!  Ewww, ugly!  This isn't how big boys and girls color."

She walked over to a six year old boy named Robbie and asked to see his paper. He handed it to her and she held it up next to mine.

"Now, look here at Robbie's picture.  See how pretty it is?  Now look at Mel's.  Isn't it ugly?  Whose do you like better, Robbie's picture or Mel's picture?"

The class all pointed, and agreed in loud voices that Robbie's was indeed the prettier of the two.  She slapped the picture back in front of me, drove again home the point that my picture was ugly, and went back to her desk.

When kids would pick on me during recess (one particular boy named Derrick used to scoop up ant hills and dump them in my hair) and I went to the teacher for help, she would banish me inside, saying that only babies cried, and if I was going to be a baby I had to sit in class with the babies in the daycare portion of the school.  This soon lead to me being forced to sit in the daycare and watch kids play outside the window instead of going to recess at all.  When I would cry for being humiliated, the teachers in there would burn me under the arms with matches.  One teacher would wrap a bit of fishing line around the first knuckle of my index finger when I cried, and one day she wrapped it so tight and left it for so long that my finger swelled too much for her to cut the string off.  My fingertip had long since turned purple, and when my dad picked me up she tried to convince him I had done it to myself.

With the exception of a few kind teachers along the way, all of the authority figures in my life at school were cruel to me for no reason I was aware of.  I was a shy kid, a good student.  I was always well behaved in class, always did my homework and got straight A's.  But there they were, mean adults who would pick on kids to make themselves feel better about themselves.  And they always picked me.  I'd get a break every couple of years and have a nice teacher or two.  Then you get thrown into middle and high school and you have a whole slew of teachers throughout the day, with just enough good ones in the middle to keep you from jumping off the roof of the gymnasium.  And it wore on me for my entire educational career.  And there at the end, I guess I had just had enough.  And my grades reflect that.  The classes where I had "good" teachers teaching subjects that were interesting, I have A's and B's.  The teachers I hated?  D's.  I even failed my US History class in my junior year.  But I had permission to fail that class.  The teacher was a dick, he hated me, and since his entire grading scale was based on whether or not he liked you (literally, 75% of your grade was class participation and citizenship; you could have a 0 test average and still pass with a 75) I did not do well in his class the first time I had him my sophomore year.  I tried to get out of his class, but was encouraged to "work through it" by my guidance counselor.  I never spoke to that woman again.

It's easy to reflect back as an adult and chide my younger self for letting other people get to me in such a manner.  But back then, I cared what people thought about me, and it really broke me down when people would be mean or rude to me.  I spent the better part of my teenage life trying to be this person everyone else wanted me to be so that I could be friends with the popular set.  Nothing I tried worked.  That whole high school popularity bullshit.  All I wanted was friends.  I was finally able to let it go my senior year of high school, and spent the majority of the time ridiculing them.  Fuck them.  If they spent half as much time getting to know me as they did making up stuff about me, things could have been different.  These days it's like Good Charlotte says, "Don't want to be just like you."  Another Loser Anthem.  Wah-oh.

So yeah, the matriculation part.  Application done.  FAFSA done.  Application fee paid.  Official High School Transcript and college transcript handed in.  Now all that's left is to not totally bomb the COMPASS.  We'll see how that goes tomorrow.