3. Right after I turned 15, I stopped attending high school. It was never my considered plan to stop going to school in general–hell, I loved school, I’d been a straight-A, problem-free student until the year before. I couldn’t stand my high school. So I stopped going. One day just became two and six and 30 and instead of going to school I was taking the bus downtown with my mom’s old Pentax and taking photographs of street kids. It wasn’t a full life. But it was better than what I was avoiding.

After a few months of this it was clear that a change of plans was in order. I canvassed other local high schools, looking for better curricula, a less brutal social hierarchy, teachers who’d gone to college. You know. Better. I’d been permanently disillusioned by the math teacher who insisted that a kilometer was 10 meters*. I considered finishing my diploma at the local community college. I tried a film criticism class. We watched My Beautiful Launderette. It was a good movie and I didn’t know anyone else in the class. All I can remember is the sniggering guys asking the teacher: “What? Are those guys some sort of fags or something?” and then demurring in that “I’m-not-gay-so-this-makes-me-uncomfortable” way. I didn’t go back.

Instead I took my GED. When I signed up there were pamphlets offering prepatory courses. To this day–yes, I’m being condescending here–I’m still baffled by this. The GED is e-a-s-y. Like the puzzles on the back of a cereal box easy. Like knowing what a circle looks like, or what color blue is. Honestly, if you can’t pass the test, you should really still be in school. I’ve heard it’s 8th-grade level. 8th grade might out-sophisticate the GED, though.

I remember taking it. They gave us eight hours: I was done in two-and-a-half. I missed one question on the entire multiple-choice test. Lest I sound like a complete snot, I only got an 87% on the essay part, which shows you where my weaknesses were (and perhaps still are). Considering how bad I am at math, however, my near-perfect score is sort of frightening when looked at from the perspective of our prospective future work force.

I then re-took the SAT (I previously took it in 7th grade in a special Johns Hopkins program).

Then I went to college. Here’s a secret: You can just…go to college. If you take pains to prove you’re not a slack-jawed troglodyte, you can probably find one that will let you in without the rather required-seeming pre-requisite of going to, errr, school.

I now have a Bachelor of Arts in Arts and Letters from Portland State University. Yes. I know that major is impossibly vague. But I spent seven years in undergraduate school taking everything. If it gives you an idea, my first quarter at PSU, when I was 15, I took human sexuality, an ethics course, French and geology. I really liked art history and linguistics. I am to this day a huge fan of liberal, liberal, liberal arts education.

Then I went to England for graduate school in computer science, but I digress.

* During my argument with her, I pointedly asked: “So, does that mean that this classroom is roughly a kilometer long?”

She looked around sneakily, and in that way of adults who can’t ever admit they’re wrong because the world would explode or something, said: “Yes.”