Day Two: Wherein I Intimidate Juggalo Scholars With My Jailhouse Stare

Monday
Tuesday

With the job hunt at a standstill I have decided to make the swan dive into higher learning, if you can call Riverside’s Community College higher learning. I’ve never been to any college, so this will be a real change from my usual comic book-reading existence.

I have to confess, I didn’t want to ever attend college, just so I could be one of those success stories where people say, “He just sold a movie script, and you know what? He never even went to college!” The problem is, I’m not successful, so it’s just a sad statement. “He couldn’t get a job at Starbucks, and he never even went to college!”

I have faint memories of my High School in Littleton, but orientation brought them all back like a bucket of piss in the face. Pimply teens fidgeted in chairs, snickering and texting like their Juggalo lives depended on it. I’m not sure what they thought of me, the hunched 30-year-old with gray in his beard. They probably figured I had just been released from prison, which is a stereotype I won’t fight.

The biggest shock to my beer-withered brain was the assessment test. Designed to place me in the correct class, the test covered reading, English basics, and (drumroll) math! Fuck you, math, I hate you. I breezed through the reading and English, but the math was just a festival of guessing. In the end I passed all three segments, much to my surprise and delight.

Now I just need to figure out why I was in prison for the last fifteen years.
-- Andrew Orvedahl

Andrew Orvedahl is a comedian, and person, born and raised in Denver who recently moved from sweet Denver to Riverside, California. He hopes this Week in the Life blog series will provide a tiny glimpse into the magnitude of regret he feels.