>>102979380Y’know, it’s funny. All my friends before college were homeschooled. La Porte, Indiana, is Homeschooling Capital Of The Universe, and so even though I went to public school myself, all of my actual friends were homeschooled, because all of my friends were from church. And in those first few weeks of Freshman Year, I’d hear tales from home of how many of them couldn’t survive college and had to go back. And I was pretty self-satisfied, being the smug little jerk I was. That’s why you go to public school, ya nerds! To get socialized. To be able to get along with a world that doesn’t always share your views. To learn how to establish eye contact with other human beings. And yet here I was, a year and a half later, suffering the same damn fate. I was, practically if not technically, a home schooled child.
And in a few months I joined my public high school friend Steve Richardson, who had also left college for his own very different reasons, at an art school outside of Chicago. This was what saved my life, I think. I am really terrible at making friends. I am the terriblest. I am a little antisocial weirdo who is afraid to talk to people. It was amazingly good for me to go to a school chained to a person I already knew. And I was this little uptight dork and he was an aggressive outgoing horndog, and finally I was living that Roomies! buddy dynamic myself, for real.
In the meantime, in the months between schools, I would sit alone and finish out the infamous strips you are about to see. You know, the super depressing ones where Important Stuff Happens. Because that’s where my brain was at the time, and it’s where my brain lived. And out the other end, at my new school, I began to pull myself back together, just as the characters in my strip were.
I’ve never really told anybody. And now you all know.
Don’t ask me for advice on how to succeed at college.
