The Wrong Degree

When I went to college, I started out heading for an Architecture degree at Cal Poly. I took my SATs and didn't do that well, and I'm white and Reverse Discrimination was allowed by the Supreme Court, so Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo told me no, I had the wrong color skin and they weren't taking Asians that year either. I didn't want to go to Berkeley and didn't have the grades for there either, and Davis was also beyond my reach. Straight A or don't even apply. I wanted a creative program, for building mansions for rich people, because my 3 years of Drafting prep showed that's what I was good at. I designed houses like you'd expect to find millionaires living in out on the coast, or perched on a mountain, striking, interesting, good for showing off subtle wealth, yet still livable while lording it over the peons. I liked house building. It was fun. When you have a 165 IQ for geometry, it makes great sense to do that. But the SAT doesn't test for that so Cal Poly lost me forever. On the upside, I've since learned that Cal Poly graduates are half idiots, drooling thoughtless morons, half of them, because I worked with them and found out for sure. I would NEVER hire one, on the 50% chance that its one of the morons. Chico grads are smarter.

I changed majors to Physics. I'd been studying cosmology since I was 11, being a big fan of Nova (PBS documentary show on science) and really found it interesting. I'd struggled with calculus, having had a BAD teacher in high school, and another bad teacher in college, so bad I dropped the course. I retook it in college and barely scraped through. For a semester before transfer from the JC to SSU, which was the local Cal State U in the next town over, I went to physics meetings organized by the physics club. I met a lot of famous guys, brought up from Berkeley or around the world, talking about their discoveries, showing off the math. I learned to respect the math. And that I could analyze it by listening to their assumptions and pointing out the flaws. Flawed assumptions show up in the experiments, often invalidating the result. If only they'd had ME to double check them before spending millions of our grant money. I would write down my question and ask at the end. I got a lot of jaws dropped, almost every meeting, by pointing out the Emperor has no Clothes to famous physicists. I suppose this is where I learned to enjoy tossing logic grenades into the room and smirking at the faces.

I destroyed the Onionspace Theory with  a pointed question. Its currently known as Inflation (Cosmology), and remains unproven and untestable. A pity because the idea of infinite universes and a neverending Big Bang, is rather delicious. We could hop to a lower universe and never die off, you see. Infinite resources, infinite energy, infinite life. No need for space ships. Build a portal and walk from this earth to that one. Repeat till you find one you like. When that gets ruined, repeat again. So far there's no way to prove it. Best description of a test I've seen was testing for the curvature of space using some massive error shady test that I'm afraid I just don't buy. A pity. At least it was working along reasonable lines for a test. I'd like to see it tested more thoroughly.

My problem came after I transferred and found the classes really hard, entirely math based with few experiments, deeply boring, and nothing about cosmology. I also learned that I needed a lot of help to pass calculus, that it was beyond my abilities. I am a genius for shapes, not numbers. Not being able to do Calculus closed most of the doors of the ambition I possessed. No science, no engineering. No design.

At this point, I was so full of despair suicide looked like the right answer and I ended up pouring my grief and failure into my novels, which went from slow simmer to full boil. I wrote dozens of short stories, 5 novels, and an autobiography by the time I finished college.

My next degree choice was flipping a coin between Biology and Geology. I was equally interested in each subject, and discarded Archaeology as unemployable (still is). My birthday was a major quake. I figured it was a sign, and the girls were hotter and more slutty in Geology. This turned out to be true, to my grief. They were Lanterns, not Candy, and lanterns are bright and shining. Hard to resist, even if the attraction means you get burned. And I did. More fuel for my novels.

By the time I finished my geology degree, the president at the time, some easily forgotten Southern bastard from a trailer park who couldn't keep it in his pants, had shut down the largest employer of geologists, the government agency called the US Geological Survey. In operation for a couple centuries, mapping and cataloging the land and its resources in the USA for the public good. He shut it down, fired 75% of them, and waited. A couple years later, his Veep offered the survivors a job lying about global warming to suit his politics, via govt controlled grants and cult behavior. The misinformation and propaganda feed a cult of blame.

I picked the wrong degree. Many of the people I've known did too. Someone we trusted told us to follow our dreams, people called our parents. That was bad advice, but we shouldn't expect good advice from the Spoiled Generation that failed to raise us. I don't like them very much. They deserve being abandoned in rest homes. Its their doom. We're too busy cleaning up after their lives to clean up after them when they crap themselves. They never seem to have grown out of it.