I just wrapped up another semester of classes. Barring a meltdown of some sort, I now have another bachelor’s degree. I’m not sure how excited I should be about that, but it get’s me closer to a classroom and financial independence, so I’m just going to say that it’s awesome.

As another semester winds down and I get ready for my last year, at least until I graduate, refuse to get a job in a related field and then return to get some other random degree, I realized a problem that I have.

Oh look. It's me. T-t-t-t-TODAY, Joonyah!

I mentally put myself in a no-win situation with my school work. I’m about ten years older than most of the other people I’m in class with, and I feel some pressure to perform well in comparison to them. As a result, if I bomb a test or even just match the class average, I end up feeling like I’m mentally retarded. On the other hand, I’ve turned in a lot of good assignments, assuming that those assignments are papers of some sort, and I don’t really feel good about those either.

I’ve wasted who knows how many hours maintaining various blogs for one reason and one reason only: to do irreparable damage to my personal and professional life. An unintended consequence of my effort to ruin my life through the written word is that the quality of my writing has improved. I think it would be a reach to say that I’m “good”, but I’m pretty certain that I’m better than I was seven years ago, and almost certainly a better writer than an average 19 year old.

As a result, I tend to do well on assignments that require writing. Last semester one of my teachers told me that I turned in the best paper of all of his classes. This semester I had a professor stop class to tell me how awesome my assignment was, and another pull me aside after class twice to tell me that one of my papers was awesome and to save another to show future classes. This should probably just make me feel fantastic, and it kind of does, but it’s kind of embarrassing at the same time because I’m old. It feels like I’m a high school kid competing on a pee-wee football team – it’s kind of neat to be the top wide receiver on the team, but I have to wonder if I would be scoring as many touchdowns if I didn’t have a ten year, and, as a result, two foot and one hundred pound advantage over the safeties and linebackers who were trying to cover me.

I was thinking about this yesterday, and realized that I’m trapping myself – if I’m going to be upset with being at or below average and ashamed and embarrassed if I do well, I can’t win. I might as well just be happy, and stop finding ways to feel bad about receiving praise from people, because that’s moronic.

I think there’s another key point to remember, too. Let me tell you a story.

When I was attending community college…11 years ago…Jesus Christ…anyway, 11 years ago, in the late 90′s, when Bill Clinton was the President, Gas was a little bit over a dollar a gallon, the Playstation was the most powerful gaming system on the market, people used discmans to listen to music, and I was in Jr. College, I was enrolled in a creative writing course with my friend Dan. There was a woman in that class that was older than everyone else by quite a bit. She seemed ancient to 19 year old me, but it’s entirely possible that she was younger than I am now. Everyone over the age of 24 looks like they’re 50 when you’re that age. She was also, by far, the most outspoken critic of everyone else’s work. Every other student in the class was pretty diplomatic about their criticism, but this lady was not. If she thought you were turning out sub-par work (and she always thought you were turning out sub-par work), she would be sure to let you know that you had let her down again.

This isn't really related to my post. I just needed another picture, and I think that this is hilarious. Look at Darth Vader ride that cat!

Then came our final project. There are a lot of things that I DON’T remember about that final project. I can’t recall the requirements were for length, or format, or content. I don’t actually have any recollection of what I turned in for my final project. What I do remember is what the angry older woman turned in.

It was a children’s story called “Mr. Hedges’ Ghostly Christmas”. I know what you’re thinking, and I agree; that’s a solid gold title for a children’s story. I can only hope that since I saw her last, she has written an entire collection of similar stories – “Ernie Blumpkin’s Goulish Thanksgiving” and “Donald Fergason Files His Taxes and Fights a Werewolf”, just to name a few (Should I just be a children’s author? Those are some kick-ass titles I just came up with, and I could turn my Dr. Seuss-style story of The Juggalo into a full story – that’s three books right there!)

Unfortunately, the quality of the actual story didn’t match the inspired title. I won’t go into the gory details, because it’s like describing a funny conversation to someone who wasn’t there – to really appreciate the book, you would need to sit down and thumb through it with me (and you could, because I still have a copy). What you do need to know is that it wasn’t very good. You might even call it hilariously bad – the kind of thing that me and my friend Dan still giggle about eleven years later, especially when we think about the semester of abuse everyone in the class took from her over our childish, sophomoric attempts at creative writing (To her credit, we were a group of teenagers in a community college creative writing class – the older I get, the more likely it seems to me that all of that abuse was warranted. I just blew my own mind.)

The moral of the story is this: Old people can suck at stuff too. Most of the time when there are other nontraditional students in my classes, they only kind of seem to know what’s going on, so when I get compliments for doing a good job on something, I shouldn’t feel bad about it because I’m old. Just because I’m 30 doesn’t necessarily mean anything – when I have to write a 12 page proposal on how to fix OPEC, I could completely dominate the assignment and get the highest grade in the class, but I could just as easily turn in Mr. Hedges Ghostly Christmas, so, like I said, when people tell me I’m awesome, rather than put a bunch of cognitive energy into twisting that into something to be embarrassed about, I’m just going to be glad that I finally understand how to be a good student.

Idea: 1.Enroll in a Political Science class that I don’t need to graduate. 2. For my final, turn in a copy of Mr. Hedges Ghostly Christmas. 3. Carefully document what happens.