Saturday, March 21, 2009

In Geneva today, working all weekend. After all these years I find myself blogging; still spilling words onto a screen, but everything else is so different now. After all those years of college and all that money I am paying back, I became a paramedic. It is a good job, and I like it, but it doesn't pay enough money for that $82,000 in student loans I took out.
They told me that spending money on an education is an investment. Turns out it wasn't.

There are those who like to tell me I wasted my education. That those six years were, somehow, tossed like garbage on the side of the highway. I don't think so, really. I have an associate's degree in liberal arts, a bachelor's degree in writing and theater, a bachelor's degree in philosophy, a paramedic certification. More than that, I discovered who I was, I made good friends along the way, I traveled, I studied great authors and thinkers, I argued for what I believed in and fought against those who wanted me to believe something else. I lived in large dorms and tiny apartments, a townhouse, a basement. I met people who thought completely differently than I did and who challeged my way of life, I wrote thirty-page papers arguing why propoganda in a republic is a necessary tool. I took dance classes, wrote a book of poetry, acted in plays. I wrote arguments on the nature of reality and Russian history and the nature of loyalty. I am a better person for how I spent those six years. It makes me a better friend, a better medic, a better wife. It is hard to see any education as a waste.