Friday, February 29, 2008

And You Wonder How He Made Those "C's"

I have a burgeoning obsession with the ideas of fairness and responsibility in our country. At first I thought it was a trait of a younger generation, but it’s not. I see people every day who bring a situation upon themselves, then want to blame someone else.

The most recent example was at my gym (for those of you who don’t know me, YES, I do occasionally push away from the feed trough long enough to work out. For those of you who know me, STOP SNICKERING!).

I was eavesdropping—shocking, I know—on one of the trainers and his trainee. He was talking about how he really wanted to go to med school, but unfortunately, he hadn’t taken college very seriously and most of the classes he would have needed high marks in, he had barely passed with a C.

“Did you know . . . THEY won’t let you take those classes over? If you make a C? If I had failed ‘em, I could take ‘em over. But now they’re on my transcript forever. And it keeps my GPA too low for med school.”

THEY. So it’s not his own inabilities or lack of dedication that’s standing in his way. It’s THEM. He could be a doctor by now, dammit.

Apparently The Spawn of Einstein doesn’t realize that, when you retake a failed class, they AVERAGE your grade, which pretty much gives you a C, AT BEST. But then, I wasn’t really smelling rocket fuel burning off his brain.

He went on to say that he had considered enrolling in a completely different college and “starting over.” He was confident that he could get away with it for undergrad, “but when you get into the 'doctoral program' (i.e. Med School) they go over your background with a fine-tooth comb," and he was certain that once his ruse was discovered he’d be kicked out.

Boy he sure is worrying about a lot of stuff that’s never going to happen. And I’m sure he’s uttered the words “so not fair” in more than one conversation about his thwarted medical career.

I can’t tell you how relieved I am that I don’t have to worry about walking into a doctor’s office one day and seeing this mass of muscle with air on the brain holding the stethoscope. “What up, bra?” the doctor would say as he put the stethoscope to my forehead. “Dude, I can almost hear what you’re thinking . . .”

Oh, well. At least he's pretty.

No comments: