In response to the responses

"its kinda scary how your whole life depends on how well you do as a teenager"

I (and pretty everyone I knew with my same background) certainly had the freedom to fuck up.  Drink.  Do drugs. Sell drugs. Dye their hair. Take classes in Madonna. Or the aesthetics of disgust. Skip some classes.  Change majors.  Several times.  Drop out of college and go back later.  Spend all their time at college almost failing out because they’re doing too much theater tech and then start a successful business doing theater lighting. Drop out multiple times, turn their apartment into a grow room, realize they can’t be a giant fuck-up and still make money selling weed, stop doing acid, go back to school and 15 years later being making good money as a computer programmer.  Get a degree in communications and then go back to school and become a neurologist. Go to Harvard law school and later decide they hate being a lawyer, then become a rabbi. etc. etc.

But I don’t think that’s representative.  There are so many things that I did that could have gotten me arrested, and that pretty much would have been the end of it.  Or maybe it wouldn’t have been.  Losing financial aid wouldn’t have automatically barred me from a college education.  But for most people it would.

If you have the safety net and the resources, you can really get away with a lot, and chalk it up to life experience and lessons learned.

Maybe I’ve just been reading too much Carl Hart, Matt Taibbi, Elizabeth Armstrong, etc.

(no subject)

Randomly thinking about Pride and Prejudice while I’m supposed to be re-redoing the figures for my manuscript.  Thinking about Charlotte and how many expectations were placed on her, and how her only way out seemed to be marrying Mr Collins, and whether her life would have been easier if her father has continued to be a merchant instead of taking on the life of the country gentleman. Though the way the Sir Lucas is described has such a tinge of snideness, about his social pretensions and the tackiness of calling his house “Lucas Lodge” that it’s hard to tell what is just Austen’s distaste for active social climbing (as opposed to whatever it is that Elizabeth is doing when she marries Darcy).