Joy for Some, Irony for Me

Guess what I got in the mail on Friday? The official notification that my application for admission as a senior to our local university was accepted. I've seen the joy that many high school graduates feel when they get that letter. It means they've got a chance to be something. I didn't get that feeling.

I was really lucky when I graduated from high school. Thanks to my academics and test scores, I would have been accepted to almost any college I applied for. In retrospect, I don't think I picked the right school, but who's to say what's "right?" Maybe I went where I needed to be. Still, I can't shake the feeling that I wasn't aiming high enough when I picked schools. But I digress.

Once again, my acceptance to this university was a foregone conclusion -- I already knew what the answer was going to be because I met the criteria for "automatic" acceptance: A baccalaureate degree from an approved college. As lagniappe, I even had a graduate degree.

But think of the kids whose high school grades and test scores aren't as high as mine were. Those kids for whom the letter I received represents a chance to break the chains of ignorance and poverty and join the ranks of the educated. It embodies the promise of an education that will expose them to the larger picture and enable them to more fully understand the beautiful complexity of the world.

I do know the feeling of waiting for such a letter. I remember the protracted, edge-of-my-seat panic I endured after I applied to many graduate schools. My acceptance was anything but guaranteed -- it was a long shot. My undergraduate performance was lackluster, and thanks to ignorance and apathy my score on the standardized admissions tests I took were barely acceptable. I was absolutely terrified that I wouldn't be accepted, because I had a college degree that made me uniquely qualified to read the newspaper, but little else. Back to the closet in the file room with you, buddy.

The irony here is that, absent some radical and sudden change in my situation, I'm not going to our local university or any other school. I'm as smart as I'm going to get. I had more than my fair share of luck, and still ended up in a job with no future -- a dead end. Despite my education, I'm not utilizing it. It's not that I can't do anything else, it's that I have no idea what I'd rather be doing. The education and experience I've accumulated has become a burden rather than the key to a brighter future.

Well, this post got happy fast, didn't it? I'll shut it down before I make myself any giddier.