The Day I Became an Autodidact

Two years after I graduated from high school in 1986 Kendall Hailey published the book The Day I Became an Autodidact and the advice, adventures, and acrimonies that befell me thereafter. The book was a record of a girl who was dissatisfied with her education and in her sixteenth year moved to take complete control of it. Her picture was on the cover of the book and I developed a huge crush on her while I was still in Waldenbooks. I too had always been dissatisfied with my education and wanted to take complete control of it. So I bought the book.

When I looked up Kendall on the net last night I came up with a review of her book which contained the line: "The only danger to reading The Day I Became an Autodidact is that you might compare your energy level to hers, your reading list to hers, and come away with the feeling that you've somehow wasted your life." That is a pretty good picture of how trying to read that book went. Jealousy and envy stopped me from finishing that book when I was 19. The mundane forces of living and making a living became my excuse for not finishing my education. I still have the book. And the desires to both give myself the liberal arts education I've always wanted and to date Kendall Hailey are still strong.

While there is no news on the romantic front I have taken it upon myself to make 2005 the year of my self-education. It started when I received one of those catalogues in the mail over Christmas. This one was was wrapped in clear plastic and you could see that there was a cd enclosed. I manage a store for a living and am pretty much a basket case from the second week of November until the end of each year. My housemate (and x-wife) has a large collection of audiobooks and cd's on a wide range of new age subjects. Her bookshelves resemble a small metaphysical bookstore. I figured that it was something of hers and left it sitting on the dining room table until the about the second week of January.

Well the catalogue was from an outfit called The Teaching Company and the two lectures on the cd were on Relativity and Early Christian Writings. One listen during my morning commute was enough to get me hooked. I had to have more. I started going through their catalogue and website and forming my curriculum. My first purchase was The Joy of Science. The thinking behind that choice was that my scientific education is severely lacking. I met my science requirement in High School with a survey class called Earth Science and I dropped geology after the midterm in Jr. College. (My dropped to passed ratio in Jr. College is so bad that I have been banned from the three community colleges in San Mateo County.) My second purchase was right up my alley, (my secret desire would be to be a high school history teacher if I didn't have the problem of hating both students and teachers) Interpreting the 20th Century: The Struggle over Democracy.

For Christmas one of my employee's gave me World of Warcraft. I will go deeper into the disruption of life and sleep that my first MMORPG brought me on a different post. Let's just say that I was spending all my non-commute or work time playing this infernal game. These lectures fit right into that lifestyle. I could play the game and get an education at the same time. The problem was that I was eating these lectures up fast. I tried to make the economic argument that it was a hell of a lot cheaper to by these cd's than it would be to enroll at UC (plus that old problem of getting into the University of California when I'm already banned from Community College). I realized that I was going to go broke in a hurry if I kept this up. Then I remembered my old friend ebay. It turns out that Teaching Company items hold their value pretty well. . (Although I don't know what I was thinking ending an auction on Easter. That probably cost me at least $10.)Right now I'm listening to Argumentation: The Study of Effective Reasoning but I've got my eyes on No Excuses: Existentialism and the Meaning of Life, Contemporary Economic Issues, and Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition.

Yesterday I discovered another wonderful tool on my Knowledge Project when I subscribed to Questia. There actually is real information on the internet! I don't have to google for crap anymore!