Do you know what Tupac's favorite song was? in anticlimatic

Something about me that surprises people is that I took two years off of grammar school- 8th and 10th grade- and I barely graduated at all when the end of 12th rolled around. In fact I had to work late into that summer to produce some bare minimum of credentials the state could stamp and hand me a diploma.

It wasn’t that I struggled academically, I just struggled to show up to class at all during my senior year. In effect, I nearly took three years off, if you add up the work I should have done that year, but simply wasn’t there to do. When I say I took 8th and 10th off, I mean that literally. I talked my mother into experimenting with home schooling like some of her church friends, and when the booklets arrived I just spent the year copying the answers from the answer booklet to the worksheet booklets, and just played outside the rest of the time.

When I returned the next year, I was concerned that having missed out on the “next step” in each of the primary disciplines of grammar school, I’d be screwed- but to my surprise, I didn’t really seem to miss anything during the year I took off. I just slid right back into the groove like I never left. It was reliving but also perplexing.

After a year of normal school again (9th grade) and all of the headaches and stress that come with High School, I was ready for another year off- so I took one. Spent my 10th grade year much the same as my 8th grade year, only “play” was beginning to take on early adult motives. I explored a lot. Got into tech and became a proto Geek of the early internet age.

But after that year I was feeling lonesome and ready to enjoy some camaraderie in the teenage years, so for my last 2 years of school I changed it up again and went back to spend time with my friends. Again it was stupidly easy to just slip back into the groove like I never left, but after the taste of early adulthood freedom, once I had a car, I found it incredibly difficult to take school seriously. I was ravenous for knowledge, but none of what I was hungry for was on offer in that place.

I really abhor the education system. Do we even realize the life we are sucking out of children that we send there? Rather than cram people’s heads with useless crap, I think children should be free to follow their own interests. Or just be bored, if not. I think creativity comes partly from boredom- turning the mind inside out to escape the painful stillness, opening systems and areas and options unknown in the process.

Tupac’s favorite song, which was played at his funeral, is Vincent by Don Maclean. A song that always makes me cry if I’m in the mood. There is something about that song that hits so many notes of Truth, to me. It celebrates creativity and beauty by demonstrating it- replicating van gogh paintings with words so precise and accurate and elegant they almost serve as an equal substitute.