Back to School Part 1

I was having a pretty fun life during the mid-90s, living at home, working at a comic book store, seeing my fiance on the weekends, and partying with my friends at night. I didn't have any expenses except for my own fun and I was such good friends with my manager that I could sleep off hangovers in the back room of the store during work hours. Life was easy, and that wedding date was a couple years away. But then the comic store closed and my half-assed attempts at creative projects never panned out. So I got married and moved to San Diego with no job and no prospects. I guess I just thought that everything would just eventually work out. Somehow we would get by.

My wife had just got her degree and was starting a Teacher Credential program while waitressing part-time. I just got another menial retail job. I think at this stage I was already memorizing quotes that appealed to me but I never thought of them as a religion. My wife is the best because she never once forced me to find a career and make something of myself. She was real subtle with questions like: "Don't you want to have kids?" Yeah. "Don't you want to have a house?" Sure. "Then we're going to need more money than this." I always thought of maybe getting some kind of warehouse job that paid better and never really gave much thought to going back to school. Then one day we were hanging out with another couple who happened to be college graduates. It was like something out of a bad sitcom, they were all talking and laughing about stuff and I was totally clueless. They were talking about science stuff (all science majors) so I wouldn't have understood even if I had gone to college, but this incident was the first time I actually said to myself "Maybe I should go back to school." I suddenly got this urge to learn again after a six year hiatus and decided to register at the local community college. My wife offered the ultimate support. "Don't overwhelm yourself. Take night classes so you're classmates will be mostly adults. Only take two classes on topics that you want to know more about. But make sure that all of your units are transferable to a university." Perfect advice. My first two classes were Geology and Ancient Civilizations, and once I started there was no looking back.

In junior college I really enjoyed classes in History and the Humanities. I took courses on foreign cultures as well as the required math and sciences. I knew I was going to transfer to a university, but which one? And what major? My wonderful wife stepped in again to help focus me. "What do you really enjoy? What could you do for the next 30 years?" Working at the comic store was my all time favorite job. I liked being around the books and organizing them, hell, even helping the customers wasn't too bad. Why not work in a library? There is only a Master's Degree for Library and Information Science so I had a lot of schooling ahead of me. I contacted a Library Science program and found out that my Bachelor's Degree was just a piece of paper to get me into the Master's program so I could major in any subject I wanted. I figured English or Literature would be a good foundation since there wasn't a degree in Humanities. So I finished all my transferable units and set off to university with the plan of getting a degree in Literature with a focus on the German language.