I was reminiscing with my friend David from high school this weekend. We were talking about our court ordered busing experience to the other side of town and how that was a year of wasted school education. Before you start swinging, let me tell you that if you go to UNCW, whether you are on financial aid, mom and dad dollars, or working your way through, you are very fortunate and I’m glad you’re here. It also means you are smart enough, and young enough, to remember 9th grade and what it was like. Beginning driver’s education, home economics, sports for big people, the beginning of real school, big people school – High School. The Holy Grail for all kids coming out of middle school or private school is the 9th through 12th grade. The first real life where you didn’t feel entirely like a child and can in many ways chose the direction of your life.

Our problem in 1974 was we were bused across town to a different school for 9th grade. We didn’t get to start our High School. What was up with that? It was a real school, but the idea was a false one, one that was designed by a political process that most teachers didn’t understand let alone teenagers. All we knew was that instead of walking 5 minutes down the street to begin (say it!) HIGH SCHOOL (!), we were going to be bused 45 minutes across town, to a place that we never even knew existed. We were told to stay on the bus, and when we got to school we were not to leave the school grounds. We were not to walk in the neighborhoods surrounding the school. We were not to talk with anyone outside of the school grounds. That was expected from us for the entire school year of the 9th grade, from August to June in 1974. What a bunch of baloney. Don’t get me wrong, we needed to integrate and in some places we still do. But children don’t understand all that. For them it’s just another stupid thing that grownups are doing to them. I was no different.

And so my friend Dave and I discussed about how that we were bused across town was a year of wasted education. As we talked, we each remembered other things about 9th grade as well. As it turned out, it wasn’t as wasted as we thought. In my case I remembered:

1) I got to meet and become friends with (to this day) a whole new set of friends at the
school from the neighborhood we were bused to and told to stay away from which, of course, we did not.

2) I got to talk to a girl named Susan on the bus to and from school, when I wasn’t throwing spit balls and other crap out the windows of the bus.

3) I had sex for the 1st time. What? Too personal? Well I certainly remember it.

My Friend Dave has his own list. And what’s interesting is that there was nothing on either of our lists that had anything to do with racism, or busing, or riots or anything like that. It just wasn’t an issue and everyone we met at the other school was cool. No, the reason that was a year of wasted “in the classroom” education was because we were 14 years old and there is nothing stronger on earth than the testosterone fueled energy of 9th graders. There is no teacher on earth who can compete with that. That energy boost doesn’t wear off until you are a graduating university senior faced with paying off school loans, getting a job, and moving out of your friend’s sublet pig palace that reeks of reefer and spilled beer, into a real apartment that you have to actually maintain. When you graduate your energy is spent on activities that have nothing to do with school and everything to do with trying to do big people stuff, except now you are big people. But instead of changing the world, you guys are still changing yourselves. Hey, that’s the way it is all the time everywhere and that’s why things don’t change, in case you were wondering. Only a few people have it together from High School through University. I’m just saying.

Over the last week I have had several conversations with my collegiate friends from school and several times the question of what their education was all about came up for discussion.  It seems these juniors and seniors are still unsure of what they want to do with their lives after graduation.  I totally understand.  It seems that our society places a heavy  burden on making one feel that they should be certain about life, where it’s going for them, and to have a plan for the future in order to achieve the American dream of  career, family, house, toys, and security for retirement, in that order.

Well, I hate to break it to you, but it’s not that simple.  So how does one balance the natural feeling of being unsure, against the expectation that one should be quite certain about it all?  That is the grand paradox that many graduating seniors are faced with.

The simple part is understanding the system.  It’s like this:  graduating gives you the credentials that you need to work, in some capacity, in a field that you have the credentials in.   One hopes to be able to apply for a job in an industry like IT, or Nursing, or Education.  UNCW is a good university and will supply, to those students who apply themselves, respected credentials in the degree fields they offer.

Now you may say duh, I know that, but a lot of you who know graduating is the key are still not really sure what you want to do with your life and ergo the declared major may not be, in fact, what you want to do with the rest of your lives.  That’s the not so simple part and there is no easy answer.

Many people graduate and are fortunate enough to love what they do from the onset and they do that for a lot of years until they retire.  But most of you will change jobs several if not many times in your life.  That’s the new reality in the work place.  And some of you will feel as if you have missed some vital element that makes you feel comfortable in your choices, happy to be going down that particular road.  You will wonder about all the other choices you could have made, or things you may be missing by sticking to one major that, now that you are ready to graduate, may not be what you really want to do.

There is no answer for feeling like that.   One can only say that the best thing to do is to stick to it, and graduate.  At the end of the day, they can’t take that away.   You finished, and you’ll always have that accomplishment, one that is not easy to do.  It is a good thing.  The dirty little secret of education (besides that it casts pearls before swine) is that many people don’t know what they want to do even after they graduate.  But the great thing about our society is that it is flexible enough to allow smart people to try different things.  It is also flexible enough to reward those that definitely know what they want with opportunities to lead in their chosen field and by doing so set the standard of success.

But some of us are made to try different things, and many of us even fail sometimes; more than once.  That’s part of life.  As an older student I can’t say that life is easy, or that it’s fair.  It’s not.  But it is what you make of it. Don’t worry if you don’t know exactly what it is that you want to do.  Work hard, graduate, and then take opportunity as it comes.  If you let it, life can be a wonderful thing.   Or if you let it, it can be a stinking pile.

So how about the Women’s U.S. Open match? I’ve been reading the blogs on it and it only took about 5 minutes after the event happened for things to turn ugly. Only in America do we have the technology that allows us to be jerks this quickly. So anyway, I bought a Sunday N.Y. Times. For those born and raised in North Carolina who do not know “The Gray Lady,” though I think half of Jersey and quite a few from the “Island” have migrated to Wilmington these days and probably have an idea, the Sunday edition of the NY Times is the equivalent of 8 years of my home town newspaper, “The Stinken-Blatt” laid on top of each other and folded.

So here’s what’s in “The New York Times” 13 September 2009 Sunday edition, and my take on it.

1. “Clean Water Laws Neglected at a Cost” – over half-a-million violations to water pollution laws by chemical factories, manufacturing plants and other workplaces in the last five years.

Frank’s take – Big Business screwing the public’s health by not cutting profits enough to pay to clean the environment.

2. “A legal Battle: Online Attitude vs. Rules of Bar” – Lawyer in Florida blogs nasty things about a judge. Get’s a reprimand and a fine.

Frank’s take – And he passed the Bar?

3. “Awakening Brooklyn to Ramadan, at 3:30 A.M.” – Pakistani immigrant beats drum at 3:30 a.m. each morning of Ramadan to wake worshippers of Islam so they can eat before fasting begins.

Frank’s take – In a related story, the police budget is increased by forty million dollars to protect an unnamed Pakistani immigrant who is beating his drum at 3:30 A.M. in Brooklyn.

4. “In Wisconsin, Early Signs of an Industrial Rebound – A Bellwether Company Hires a new Shift, but Many Others Remain Cautious.” – A company in Wisconsin is finally out of inventory after slow sales in these bad times. They now need to make more stuff. They hire everyone back they fired when they couldn’t sell the stuff that just now ran out. Everyone hopes that making more stuff will convince people to buy this new stuff, and employees hope the company installs new revolving doors to make it easier to be fired and hired.

Frank’s take – Come on people now, smile on your brother, everybody get together and buy something from Wal-Mart right now, right now, right now. The stock market is praying people will stop saving and start spending and save big businesses. Yes, it really is that simple.

5. “Financial Crisis: One Year Later” – An article that describes how average people are not doing so well and how financial leaders in the banking sector are doing great.

Frank’s take – Duh. And besides, how can I feel sorry for a few financial investor wieners being out of work. They made more money in a year than most people do in 10 years. These are the same big business folks that screwed the country by selling bad financial products. Yes, it is that simple.

6. “The Fading Public Option” – How the battle rages on between the government and big business with health care (this time) as the issue.

Frank’s take – The health care industry has been co-opted by the insurance industry which in turn has been co-opted by Wall Street. Universal Health Care is really about stripping corporate control from the nation’s Health Care. Yes, it really is that simple.

Those were the headlines from the Sunday NY Times, 13 September 2009. Out of six headlines, four concern big business and some sort of diverse effect. That’s two thirds for the non-math majors. But don’t believe me. Read it for yourself. And that’s just the front page. There are lots of other great articles in that paper as well, more than a person can read on a Sunday afternoon before falling asleep watching the Panthers get creamed. But like I said, read it for yourself, you’ve got a lot to think about before you graduate.

I am so sick of being sick.  I’ve coughed and wheezed and choked and sneezed, and I still am not one bit better.  I’ve been sick for 3 months.  Yes, I’ve been to the doctors.  No, I’m not contagious.  Mostly I’m a victim of sinus congestion and allergies against some unknown microbial assailant.  And believe me, drinking more doesn’t help.  I’ve tried that method a few times.  Then I tried it some more just to make sure.  In fact, I’m trying it again as I write this column so if you see any mistakes don’t blame me, it’s the medicine.

I really have no idea what to do about this.  A lot of you are in the same boat.  You are not contagious but you feel like crap.  You can’t skip class or you’ll burn those 3 or 4 free days that you need for when you really need them, like when you’re too hung over to get to class or you’ve fallen for “THE ONE” again and don’t want to get out of bed for the next three days.  And I don’t want to give up my free days either.  Though I’d rather play golf, or use my walker to shuffle down to the old folk’s home and play some bingo or something.  Hey, some of those pots have real money in them, by golly!  But seriously, no kidding they do!

I really am tired of being sick.  It changes your attitude about everything if you’re not feeling well.  My teacher gave me an A on a paper last week.  And I challenged the grade.  I mean, really I just don’t feel that good.  Has anyone noticed if there is anything in the air, (other than the smell of my column this week)?  Do we have some mutant variant strain flittering off the billion or so pine trees on campus?  Has the muck in the pond come to life and is slime-ing us with itty-bitty particles as we walk to the various food courts.  (That’s right, no matter what you call them they are still FOOD COURTS.  Get over it.)  See, I don’t feel well.

I even quit one of the UNCW clubs I belonged to last week.  It seemed that the only real reason the club existed was to give the “officers” something to put on their resume.  But the activities they proposed were mainly A) go to restaurants; and B) go to one of the officer’s homes and watch movies.  No thanks.  The Plebs need more than that.  And my home toilet seat was heat molded to my butt’s shape so it fits perfectly and I won’t use another.  It would be cheating.  But it’s my fault really.  I was silly to think that in “X” club we’d do “X” and in “Y” club we’d do “Y”.  In fact “Y” is a great question.  But it’s all part of the learning curve I suppose.  Training for future upper management.  Maybe I’ll do an advice column to answer questions about what really should be done, about everything.  I don’t feel good and I need more medicine.

Have you heard about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch? 

I was reading about this pinnacle of human achievement yesterday and never felt better to be part of the human race.  Only humans could take garbage and create a floating island bigger than Texas out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

The Patch is a collection of human plastic waste that has been discarded.  It found its way into the Pacific Gyre by moving with ocean currents.  A Gyre is not a gargoyle or giant bon fire as one would suspect but a condition where water in the ocean swirls in a vortex because of the Don Vito Corleone  affect that extends from Hollywood out into the Pacific ocean far towards Asia where they make bootleg CDs, DVDs, and computer cases so fast it creates a big rotating swirl of money between the plant owners in Asia and the Corporate Managers in America.  This swirl is rotating so fast and is so powerful that everything it comes into contact with, mostly things made of plastic, is swept up into the big green mass of money never to return.  And eventually it all winds up in a big pile floating out in the ocean like some giant Texas sized water world waiting for Kevin Costner to come sail it away.  And there is another one four times bigger in the southern hemisphere waters.

It’s incredible to imagine the amount of waste that is floating out there in our largest natural resource.  But humans do produce waste with remarkable efficiency.  And most of this Pacific Garbage Patch is plastic.  And where does all this plastic come from?  I don’t mean where do the plastic bottles of Pepsi, plastic cups, bleach bottles, dildos, shoe soles, sunglasses, lids, jars, fish net, baggies, trash cans, and all the other detritus that we toss into the biggest garbage can in the universe come from.  No wait, that would be outer space, a topic for another day.  Anyway, where does all this plastic come from?

In order to answer this question I’ll give you a quote from PlasticsEurope, the Association of Plastic Manufacturers, “The production of plastic begins with a distillation process in an oil refinery.”  So plastics mostly come from OIL.  Ah HA!  So it goes like this:  Petrochemicals provide monomers which are used to make polymers.  Polymers are created by linking together a bunch of these monomers which is essentially pouring goo in a mold and heating it and bending it into a shape.  The UNCW chemistry people are probably having a stroke with my simplification but it’s essentially on the mark.

And basically EVERYTHING is plastic.   Let’s go through the normal day of a student and see how much plastic we touch.  On those mornings I occasionally shower, I use shampoo and conditioner and that comes out of plastic bottles.  I dry my hair with a plastic cased hair dryer.  I brush my teeth with a plastic toothbrush and toothpaste out of a plastic tube.  I put on at least one or two, if not more, items of plastic like sunglasses, a belt, whatever.  Then I eat breakfast.  I may use a plastic plate, or cup, certainly my orange juice and milk come out of plastic, or plastic coated containers.  I get in my car made mostly of plastics like the panels, bumpers, light  covers, battery case, dashboard, steering wheel, and drive to school using gasoline (distilled oil just a couple of processing steps away from plastics.)  I sit in a classroom on campus and watch a movie played in an apparatus that is mostly plastic parts.  The light switch used to douse the lights is plastic, as are many other of the items in the classroom, say the dry erase markers, viewgraphs, and most of the seats we use.  As I walk to lunch at the Hawk’s Nest, UNCW’s food court on campus, I listen to my iPod which is in a plastic case, as is my cell phone, with plastic ear buds.  When I get my food order my sushi comes in a clear plastic container, and my drink is in a plastic cup.   And that’s just half a day.   But I think you get my point.

So make a mental image of all that plastic.  Now imagine, if it’s even possible, imagine all that plastic multiplied 300 million times.  Wow.  That’s a lot of plastic.  And that’s just one half of an average American day.  Europe is like that too, even if they are all eco-friendly and recycle and blah blah, blah, blah, blah.  They still go out and buy the stuff BEFORE it’s recycled.  And China is rushing to become an even greater consumer society than the U.S.A. Russia, Japan, and let’s just say it – the whole frigging planet is hooked on using plastic products.

So now imagine that there are only a few companies on the planet that actually provide the substance used to make the plastics that are used to make the products that almost EVERY SINGLE PERSON ON THE PLANET USES EVERY SINGLE DAY.   Isn’t that enough money to go to war over?