i tell people i have three degrees, but it's a gloss.

i have an actual diploma for a b. mathematics, 2006. my first & second year grades were reflective of reality, i wasn't really engaged. some As, some Bs. i then ended up homeless over third year due to being thrown out of the house (my step-mother may claim otherwise, but i was thrown out for being transgendered), and found myself trying to juggle getting through the third year of an honours degree in mathematics, while living on my girlfriend's floor - my grades were reflective of the reality of the situation. but, when i finally got things back to some semblance of normality, i got very high marks in fourth year, which allowed me to graduate with a strong B+.

when you look at my transcript, it's straight Ds in third year and straight As in 4th year - unusual, and reflective of an odd underlying reality.

when i applied for grad school, i tried to get the point across - i was homeless in third year, and math is hard anyways, and especially when you're struggling to find somewhere safe to sleep. in hindsight, i wonder if those essays hindered more than helped. i didn't really have a class analysis at the time; i just assumed the school administrators were all far leftists and would see the obvious need to be empathetic. rather, what people saw was no doubt a B+ student with uneven grades, not an A student that got screwed over by a bigoted stepmother that literally told her to starve to death for being queer.

within a few years, i'd decided i was happier working part time in a call center doing surveys than i would be with a full time job, anyways. it was enough to pay the rent, and i had a lot of free time to write and record. for perhaps the first time in my life, i was actually legitimately happy, and it came via rejecting labour rather than embracing it. i really changed a lot in those years.

my father, however, was not satisfied with the scenario, and he continually badgered me to apply for government jobs that i didn't actually want. he even tried to buy me a car at one point to make me a better management candidate (which i turned down - i told him that if he wanted to throw money at me, he should pay my student debt down, which he declined. i had no interest in a vehicle, whatsoever; i didn't, and still don't, even have a driver's license. i didn't want to be anybody's boss.). i was, i think, the first person in his extended family to ever graduate from university, and he didn't seem to understand why i wasn't instantly transformed into the monopoly guy once i got my diploma - he'd been told his whole life that education was the way out of poverty, and was baffled to watch his oldest child get through school with decent grades and then end up worse off than he was, given that he never even graduated high school. my mother was an army brat and did not graduate high school, either. when i managed to convince him that an undergraduate degree in math with a B+ average isn't exactly the most impressive education, he just reacted by trying to send me to grad school. he was insistent that i'd go to school and get ahead through it.

he was delusional; that's not how our society works. rather, you're born into your place, and there's not much you can do about it. i am the offspring of poor, uneducated people. going to school and "working my way up" is no solution to that, and you'd have to be daft to actually think otherwise. my father was lucky enough to marry into the middle class, but it then predictably rejected me as unworthy. i'm exactly what i had little choice but to be...

so, the reason it didn't work was his wife's fault, in the first place. most third year students that find themselves homeless due to conflicts with their stupid parents don't end up graduating at all - i'm the exception. but, it wasn't enough. those Ds are there forever.

i actually didn't want to go to grad school anymore and, by that time, i was old enough and independent enough to tell him "no.". i had an apartment downtown that i liked, a job across the street that paid the bills and tons of free time to spend on things i actually cared about; i didn't want to move back to the suburbs to live in his basement and work towards a math degree to get a job i didn't want (and probably wouldn't get, anyways). i was legitimately happy for probably the first time, and didn't actually want things to change. i had finally defined myself in terms i was happy about, in ways that transcended the childishness of careerism.

in the middle of 2008, just before the economy crashed, he managed to talk me into it by presenting me with a bribe: if i'd only agree to go back to school, he'd pay the tuition out of his savings account and pay my rent, as well. but, i'd have to get straight As.

i decided that that was even better than things were. that was a huge mistake...

so, carleton let me back in on a qualifying year with that B+, because they at least knew me and realized i did good work most of the time. if i could get straight As in the qualifying year, as i did in 4th year, i could start the master's degree the next year. but, i got cold feet before it started.

i looked at the potential outcomes and bailed - i interpreted the outcome, a job at cra, as an absolute death sentence. i just couldn't go through with it. nor did i want to be an academic. if i was going to do this, i wanted a job in the private sector, in the end. living in ottawa, all of the private sector jobs were technology-oriented. so, i switched into an undergraduate computer science program, instead.

then, the market crashed and my father bailed on me, forcing me to take out a student loan at the last minute in order to pay my rent. he promised he'd pay it down when the economy recovered, but he never did. i've been broke without caring much ever since. that loan is now somewhere near $100,000, and he's long dead.

so, yes, i went back in 2008 and eventually got 19.5/20 credits for a computer science degree at a very high gpa (around 95%.) before deciding that i didn't want to do it anymore. i spent the last several semesters getting through the requirements of a three year sociology of law degree. i didn't graduate from either program. while i was in the computer science program, i also took enough graduate level math courses as electives to complete a master's degree, but i did not consider having that formally acknowledged. a large number of these courses would be categorized as "computer math".

rather, i was accepted into disability at the end of 2012 and realized that this is what i actually wanted out of life - financial stability, and the freedom to exist outside of the constraints of careerism. so, i essentially dropped out of school to go on odsp - because i interpreted that as a preferable path, as a way out of careerism.

so, yes - i essentially have a programming degree. but, i'm really not very techy.

it's a reality of capitalism - we need to center our labour aspirations around market demand. i didn't choose that subject out of a legitimate interest in it, i chose it because it looked like that's where the jobs were.

in the years since, i haven't kept up, but it's not because i lost interest - it's because i didn't have any interest in the first place.

if i could do it over again, i would have stayed in the part time job and told my father to fuck off.