Ramblings on my lack of education.

Despite my thought processes resembling a stew that has been left on the stove and forgotten for at least three days

(crusty, sloppy under the tacky skin on the surface, bits of fat floating around like islands)

I seem to be embarking on a quest for learning, for order of some description.

Today I’m going to a course that will allow me to walk on a construction site. It’s under the guise of searching for better paid work, but I think there’s something deeper than that. Suddenly I want all the cards I can get. This course will get me a green one. Next I want a blue one. Then who knows… Maybe I will have a wallet containing the rainbow in useless qualifications.

I’m really tempted to broach the disaster that I made of University many moons ago and go back to it. But what the fuck for?

Ideally I would sit in a composition class, term after term. Give me ideas, give me insight, make me compose folio after folio of work and hand it in to a deadline. I can do that. The problem is that I can’t afford it. I would love to devote the next three years to sitting in a classroom arguing with a composition lecturer about why a piece shits me to tears and has no musical value at all (yes, I’ve done it before) but how in hell could I afford to live, to smoke the multitude of cigarettes and drink the buckets of coffee I require whenever I start to write a serious piece of music?

And then what do I get out of it?

The ability to compose and join every other never-will-be and publish my stuff on the net? Maybe sell something to be played by a high school student for their compulsory Modern Australian Composition unit?

What about the abandoned computing degree? The reasons I had at the time for giving it all up were that I had no intention of sitting behind a computer for the rest of my life anyway. Yeah right. I was depressed, feeling squashed by the faculty politics, and suffering financially. More than that, I just wasn’t able to hold up to the pressure of learning three programming languages at once in my second year. What did I do? Give it up so that failing was my choice, rather than that of the University.

Funnily, in times of mental disturbance I turn back to those programming days. The mental order, the focus for problem solving that it requires, the immersion in a solution. Maybe I need to remind myself that I can think in that way, retrain myself to do it even. Just as I take comfort in knowing that all the books in my library are categorised and in alphabetical order, I take comfort in the ability to solve a problem in a step-by-step process.

Again, what the fuck for?