The Jessica Journals:

My scholastic pursuits have come to a screeching and final halt. It took a mere four days for me to realize that if I continued attending college I would end up naked and bloody in the bathtub by February 5th. Therefore, on Friday last, I dropped out. This, of course, not only means more peace for me but also that you no longer have to live in terror of my bad poetry, and I have gone so far as to write a little ditty commemorating this momentous occasion.

No more verse
No more tears
For me no hearse
For you no fears

I am, however, now left as shiftless a bum as ever I was. I suppose I have to get a job now, but no immediate prospects spring to mind. If I were still living in L.A. I’d try to score a gig in the CBS gifte shoppe; however, since I live in Nowhere, Wisconsin that is impossible in the extreme. I have, however, on some of my strolls downtown to the public library noticed that NBC rents space on College Ave. Maybe I should see if they’re hiring.

Although I suffered a great deal of agony and pain during the four days spent in the hallowed halls of academia, I did also come away with a few good things.

1. The Textbooks

My mom and/or I lost the receipt for the books, which means we can’t return them. I’m certainly not crying over that because it looks like they hold some very interesting reading in the Philosophy and English Literature departments.

What can I say? Learning is always more interesting when you don’t have some ignorant, supercilious pedagogue telling you what to think while self-righteously intoning that they are showing you how to think for yourself and question the establishment. I vaguely suspect that what they mean by the “establishment” is big business and ReaganBushLimbaughHannityFoxNewsDrudgeCondiAnyoneWhoDoesntThinkKarlMarxIsTheGreatestThingSinceSlicedBread, which doesn’t quite jive with the impression that I’ve gotten over the course of 23 years which is that the establishment is left of center and has the face of Hillary Clinton or alternately of Dan Rather.

2. The Nudie Pictures

They aren’t necessarily the best work I’ve ever done, and I suppose for sheer memorableness I would have preferred a male model, but I’m willing to accept the A-cup boobs.

3. The Ice Scraper

It doesn’t work against hardcore ice; however, it deals quite handily with the frost that sometimes collects on the inside of the Jessicar’s windshield.

The one negative from this whole experience is the fact that I now have a University of Wisconsin Fox Valley parking permit sticker stuck fast to the back bumper of my beloved car; however, considering I emerged unscathed save for that minor wound I really can’t complain.

The only issue still remaining is how I should alter the rating of Hitchcock’s movie I Confess. As I mentioned in my review of it, if school turned out to be better than I hoped I intended to raise the rating from a +5 to a +6. On the most basic level, school ended up being so incredibly bad that I really ought to lower the rating; however, if I were to view the matter from a more philosophical standpoint my brief re-encounter with formal education was so awful that it curved back on itself and became quite good in that I was forced to leave so quickly. These are the things we ponder; although as yet I have not reached a conclusion. On the plus side, now that I’m not in screwl, I’ll have plenty of time to consider this particular conundrum.