My Diploma

Well I said I was gonna do it and low and behold I did. For some reason this year, some 17 years after I left school for good, I went back and finished up my Bachelor of Arts degree from the Evergreen State College. I know this, not because I actually received anything in the mail saying as much, as one might think, nor do I know this because someone phoned me to say “Congratulations!” or “It’s about time!” or “Who put a bug up your butt after all this time? Way to GO!” but because I went and looked it up on line, and the Evergreen State College website said so.

What prompted me to look is that I received a nice evaluation from Steve, my professor (no last names at Evergreen, you call all professors by their first names, dude) which said among other niceties, that I had “written the best piece he had read this quarter”. Now I’m not so sure how much of that speaks to my writing ability and how much it speaks to the quality of an Evergreen undergraduate education. Regardless (not irregardless, as I learned to not write this quarter) I’ll take such a nice compliment over a poke in the eye with a sharp stick any day.

In truth, the thing that has stayed with me the longest is the fact that depressingly, there are no shortcuts to doing this. No hidden ways that spit out ideas, or that help write better first drafts -- In fact if anything I think my first drafts have gotten worse, making what is an already daunting task all that much harder. But alongside this depressing disclosure of non-writing shortcuts, I also learned that if I just rewrite ad-nauseum, no matter how bad it starts off, it absolutely will get better.