An unexpected side-effect of having a lot of jobs is having double the number of friends. I did not anticipate this, so I was ill-prepared for the Christmas holidays. I was hoping to use Christmas and New Years holidays to recuperate. In my case, this means sleeping a lot and doing a lot of laundry. No, not this time. This time, my fiancé and I visited friends and relatives, so many that it felt more like a chore than a social outing. I created a to-do list on my palm pilot and entered the names of friends, and I put a nice satisfying check beside each one when it was done.
Today, I entered the last check - lunch with Gord and Kay.
Gord and Kay have been my friends since high school. We were all part of the International Baccalaureate Diploma Program (IB). What this meant was going to school with a lot of intelligent kids, and we were groomed to succeed. So, we had students like Roxanna, whom to this day, I despise. I am not sure how one person can be a national-team soccer player, straight A student, Class Valedictorian, champion debater, teacher's pet, etc, etc...all at the same time. Or students like Janelle, who is a world class concert pianist and tells stories of competitions in places like Argentina and how you need to be a size 2 to be a true concert pianist. I guess presentation is important. Or how about Chun, whose genius brother was a legend back then, because he got a full scholarship to Harvard. So, Chun was known as 'the brother of the guy who went to Harvard with a full scholarship'. Needless to say, there was a lot of pressure on him.
Then, there was me. On my IB program application form, I put "I like camping, and on a good day, I can play the piano."
IB was interesting. They told us we were great and gifted all day long, then they told us we were the future leaders of tomorrow; every year, they hosted IB competitions amongst IB schools, so that if we won, we would feel pretty great and gifted. All in all, we felt great!
Then, we went to university. Somewhere between Kay failing physics, Chun losing his mind because he was only accepted to MIT and not Harvard, and Eugene taking eight years to finish his Bachelors in Chemistry, I came to the conclusion that IB did not inform us of some basic ideas. When you are sixteen or seventeen, your thoughts follow a linear and logical path. It is so simple!
"A"s in high school = Getting in to the university you want= Finishing university in 4 years = Getting a Bachelors = Great job with a great pension= Nice house and that Lexus I always wanted = Finding the perfect mate = Time to have children = Happiness and some more happiness.
Oh, and all these have to happen before you are twenty-five.
No one ever mentioned the variables. Some things just kind of happen, and they take you on a completely different path. So, you end up side-tracking for awhile, then returning back on track, and then side track some more.
Gord and Kay are both twenty-six. They had their first baby last year, around the same time that Gord lost his job. It will be eight years now since graduation, and Gord is only half way through his courses in university. Kay finished her Bachelors in Kinesiology and could not find a job, so she is back to school again. This time, she picked a 1 year diploma program in Sonography, where the job prospects are better. They used to have a condo, but couldn't afford it, so now they live with Gord's parents in the basement suite.
A few months ago, I received a letter from my old high school. It cordially invites me to be a panel member at the next IB recruitment session. My job would be to talk about my experiences, and how they benefited me in my life. I can think of a lot of lessons I learnt, but none of which came from IB, so I politely refused.
