A LIFE OF REGRET

I regret very little in my life. There are things that I look back on that given the chance to do over, I may have done differently - Had I been older and wiser (and listened to my parents), maybe I would have married a white-collar, Jewish guy and had an easier life; Had I been stronger and felt more capable, maybe I would have left an unhappy marriage sooner; Had I generally been a little more active and a little less reactive, maybe I could have saved myself some unnecessary heartache - but all things considered, there are very few things that I can say I actually regret. But, and there is always a but, I most definitely regret the fact that I never went to college. It wasn't that I wasn't capable, I was just a fuck-up in high school, and spent most of that time totally stoned. Aside from missing out on the whole "college experience", I've never really felt like I achieved my full potential, and that albatross has been hanging around my neck for close to 23 years. I've been talking about going back to school forever. Talk, talk, talk, blah, blah, blah. Today, I took the first step toward actually doing something about it. I went over to my local community college, slapped down my $20.00 admission fee and took a College Placement Test.

The CPT is a series of 40 multiple choice questions on sentence structure and comprehension, and another 12 questions on basic algebra. Anything with a bunch of numbers, some parentheses and x's and y's might as well be written in Sanskrit, so I guessed at every one of the math questions and score in the 23rd percentile on that portion (not a big surprise coming from someone who can't balance her check book). This means that unless my 14 year old math geek of a daughter can learn her momma how to read Sanskrit, before I can start working toward a degree, I would have to take 2 remedial, non-credit earning math classes. Not great, but not the end of the world either.

However - I would have said "but", but since I'm in college now, I'm gonna try to use bigger words - I did score in the 96th and 99th percentile in the sentence structure and comprehension portions, respectively, which means that this 40 year old co-ed who hasn't been in a classroom in two decades is eligible to take Honors English classes. I always knew I was smart, but seeing it in black and white (high definition computer screen blue to be exact) changes everything. Damn I'm smart!! High 5's for me!!!