College
(page 2)
When I was in college, I wanted to be involved in things that would change the world.
Life is the most exciting opportunity we have. But we have one shot. You graduate from college once, and that's it. You're going out of that nest. And you have to find that courage that's deep, deep, deep in there. Every step of the way.
The cost of college education today is so high that many young people are giving up their dream of going to college, while many others are graduating deeply in debt.
After being raised as an evangelical Christian, I for years assumed that Christianity was the default — there were Christians, and then there were weirdos. I was shocked when, in college, I found that some people get offended when you tell them, for instance, that their recovery from surgery was a 'miracle'.
I was not a good student. I did not spend much time at college; I was too busy enjoying myself.
My mother had bought a sewing machine for me. When I went away to college, she gave me a sewing machine, a typewriter and a suitcase, and my mother made $17 a week working as a maid 12 hours a day, and she did that for me.
When I was 18, I was moving to New York to start college at The New School. I had done a year of college in Toronto and wasn't happy there. I didn't have any friends in New York City, but I applied and got in. It was pretty overwhelming, but everyone in New York is so ambitious and creative.
Back in college, I remember shooting stupid videos with my friends. It would be us going around town in capes pretending we were superheroes.
Healthcare as a human right, it means that every child, no matter where you are born, should have access to a college or trade-school education if they so choose it, and I think no person should be homeless if we can have public structures and public policy to allow for people to have homes and food and lead a dignified life in the United States.
After college, I was burdened with student loans to repay, no financial cushion, so I wasn't in a position to bet everything on a creative-writing career — neither the writing-workshop academia life nor the freelance-writer version, trying to scrape by on short stories and house-painting gigs.
Unemployment rates among Americans who never went to college are about double that of those who have a postsecondary education.
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