I hate college.

I suppose that phrase is a bit overused these days, but I'm taking it wildly out of popular context. Apparently I'm some kind of genetic freak whose brain is malformed and because of this I get sick enjoyment out of learning things, Acquiring new knowledge is like having a sexy Hello-Nurse inject morphine directly into my spine. Yeah, it's that good. My GPA is decent and I get enjoyment out of writing, so why then would I say I hate college? There's the roommate thing, but anyone who knows me personally probably wants to kill me and/or themselves and/or bystanders with how much I complain about that, so I'll spare you. If I had to sum up my grievances in one word, and if I needed an effective transition to the next paragraph (which I do) I'd say the whole thing is very bureaucratic.

Literary fag stuff ahead.

It reminds me of the Vogons in Douglas Adams Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (the book.) In the sequence where hero Arthur Dent and company need to free one of their ranks from Vogon prison, they must fill out the appropriate form. The Vogons are not portrayed as evil so much as political, to an extreme degree, and the forms must go through an insane, painstaking cycle of being filled out, copied, filed, un-filed, re-filed, lost, found, buried in your grandmother's back yard, dug up, stamped, approved, seconded, and so on. And in the end the heroic company fills out the wrong form and needs to start the whole bloody process over again.

End literary fag stuff.

This is not unlike college. If you want to get anything done, such as change your major, you need to fill out a form and hand it over some bored student worker secretary who makes flying bastard's shit wages and couldn't give a flying bastard's shit about you or your flying bastard's shit major. And then you sit there picking your nose while you wait for aforementioned secretary to file the paperwork. And that's the beginning of the process. You need signatures of your adviser; it needs to be stamped by advising, and in the end it can always be denied. And God help you if you want a minor.

Almost nobody graduates in four years anymore. Counting time in Programming Trade School Dirt (PTSD), community college, time off, and odd jobs in between, I've been doing the college thing for seven years now. Seven years! It hurts my brain to think that nearly a full decade of my existence has gone to getting a bachelor's degree, and right at the time when the job market in this fucking country is so bad a B.F.A might as well stand for Bees Fucking you in the Ass. And this delay in graduation isn't due to lack of effort. Colleges seem to be spending less and less time hiring competent professors or worrying about how they are going to feed the growing numbers of on-campus students, who surround the food courts like brain-hungry zombies, and more into how they can monkey around with stealing credits from community college transfer ingrates like myself, who didn't have the sense to go to college directly out of high school. Maybe it's a kind of subtle punishment for the fact that I refuse to buy things from the grossly overpriced college bookstore or I don't pimp out the school's name on every fucking overpriced article of clothing that conceals my supple body. The fuck am I supposed do: advertize to people who have already decided to go to your college? I really fail to understand how I'm supposed to have school spirit when they insist upon beating me on the head with a blunt object and expect me to come crawling back like an abused housewife, saying through apologetic sobs, "I won't burn the steak again!"

Getting back on track: I use the word bureaucratic to mainly describe the credit-handling system. The old rule was that if you transfered in with an Associates Degree you got to send 64 credits over and start as a Junior, and that promise has been made good on. Of course it all falls to shit when you've got a graduation requirement system that resembles a Final Fantasy combat interface in terms of complexity, an credit allocation interface that you, the student, cannot access, and a management program that is about as friendly as Microsoft Excel using an Arabic language package. It reminds of the time before Martin Luther and the reformation, when John Wyclif translated The Bible into English and was burned at the stake for heresy because normal dirty shit-eating peasants weren't fit enough to interpret religion and had to take the pious Latin speaking Master Race's word for it. Sorry, I didn't warn you that there would historical fag stuff in this too. That being said, I don't actually know how my college's system works, and I've talked to three different professors and gotten three different answers, and what that does for me is, you guessed it, flying bastard's shit. I don't know if I need two classes or four classes, and whether they need to be core classes, cognates, or "At-Some-Distance" classes. Whatever the fuck that means. Additionally I need to know if I've taken enough "W1" or "Q2" classes, and if I've fulfilled the required R2D2 study hall and the C3PO lecture.

Okay, not funny.

I suppose the point of all this nonsensical late-night insomnia-fueled whining is that my English schoolboy's impression of college a place where you go to learn and get catapulted into that magical far-away place called the real world, riding the updraft of letters of recommendation and applause from your stern but overall supportive professors was bullshit. The college organization itself does not look out for the welfare of its students and most of them burden their professors with so much busywork that they last thing they have time for is actual teaching. And the last thing nailing the proverbial wooden outhouse with me still in it shut is that nobody is grandfathered into anything anymore. Apparently starting a given student in a track and keeping with it all the way through has gone the way of durable goods after the 1960s; making things that last is bad for economics. And that's what college is: a business. The students are like an unfortunate byproduct of the whole thing, an appendix to the large intestine, if you will. And when appendices get inflamed, some doctor just slices the little dongle off.

I'm done explaining my bad analogies; take that any way you want to.