Rancid Monke

Let’s face it, After 12 years or more of having your little sponge mind filled with facts, figures, dates, formulas and god awful poetry you will step out of the warm embrace of academia and run face first  into the brick wall of real life. You will realize that among all the things school was cramming into you your brain-hole they were also doing a smashing job of creating unreal expectations about how the world works. At the same time they were also neglecting to teach you basic life skills that every person should know but few of them actually do. Well, I am nothing if not the bearer of bad news and harsh realities.

Let’s start with the beautiful lies school taught you.

Vacation – Are you kidding me? You set up a lot of unreal expectations about life when you hand a kid 2 months of freedom every single friggin’ year.   No one is going to let you wander away from your job for 2 months out of 10, that shit just doesn’t happen. Even teachers will tell you the myth of them getting a solid 2 months off is utter crap, there are tests to grade or lessons to plan or supplies to buy. I have also never received more than a few days off at Christmas time in the real world.  Spring break is utter horseshit that only seems to exist in the academia. “You young people have worked hard enough for now, those exams can be very taxing. How about you head on down to Cancun and spread some of your STD’s around. ” No one in the real world will give a rats ass about over stressing you until the day you snap and make an attractive Jackson Pollock out of their lower intestines in the staff room.

Recess- School starts off by teaching you that you only have to show up for half a day, and most of that time is about learning to tie your shoes, having stories read to you and napping. Honest to god, they thought my 4 hours of playing at the rice station might take it out of me, so they dropped mats on the floor and got us all to lie down quietly for 15 minutes. When I woke up they fed me celery sticks, which is the nutritional equivalent of flipping me the bird. Water and dental floss in a green little stick, YAY! Then you hit a grade with an actually number associated with it. Naps are gone but you still have two breaks a day to go play in the sunshine. You move up to the next stage and the breaks get reduced to “whatever amount of time it takes you little shits to get to your locker and back” which turns out to be about 10 minutes. Even then, at least you are working on different subjects every few hours. No one is expecting you to do eight straight hours of calculating the area of a circle despite the fact that your math skills topped out at the basics needed to figure out how to tip on a restaurant bill (and you still tip high in hopes the waitress will be so impressed she will throw herself at you) . No matter how many mundane classes you have to take, there is probably one that peaks your interest if only because the teacher has a interesting stories or an amusing speech impediment.

Welcome to the real world. You may very well be tasked to do the same repetitive, mundane, mind-numbing labour for eight hours a day for the next 40 odd years. Whether it is building the same fences, writing the same pointless reports or grinding out the same lines of code. If you are lucky you get two 15 minute breaks in your day to go sit in the staff room and stare a hole in the wall. You could try chatting up your co-workers but odds are the struggle to communicate with them during the rest of the day is enough to make you pour vodka in your water bottle every morning. Some guy in the corner will be yammering out a story about how things would be different if he ran the place, you sit there half listening/half wondering if it would be possible to decapitate him with the plastic knife someone left on the table after the last staff birthday cake.

You are a beautiful, unique snowflake – Yes, it is true there is no one out in the world quite like you. However your deep seated perversion towards wearing a diaper during sexual encounters is not really something the rest of the world is going to celebrate. Neither is your ability to play the spoons half assed well or your photographic recall of all the lines spoken in original Star Trek episodes. Unless you excel in a useful or sellable way you will end up holding down a mediocre job like the rest of us. Likely your own hope is to trot out your amazing ability to impress some girl at a party, and odds are she is still going home with the guy who has a motorcycle.I mean, he has a motorcycle for god sake, all you can do is burp the national anthem after a few beer. (switch genders in above example to your preference as needed).

You can grow up to be anything you want – Sesame Street and other kiddie programming used to tell me this shit all the time. The topper used to be “You can even be President of the United States some day”. Turn out that as a Canadian citizen I fucking well can’t. Get your facts straight Big Bird. Even in school (where they at least had a basic understanding of what country I came from), they liked to tell me that hard work and determination would get me far in life. I suppose the existence of Justin Beiber and Kim Kardashian came as a bit of a blow to guidance counselors everywhere. Of course, a career in guidance counseling probably came as a bit of a blow. Some git puppet with a hand up it’s arse probably convinced them they could run a foreign country.

Rancid Monke