Bliss is Ignorance

I was waiting for my yoga class to begin and I got to chatting with one of the yoga instructors whose friend is in the national touring company for The Color Purple. He also mentioned that she was going back to school.

I am also going back to school this semester, so I was very happy to hear that someone else was doing something great with his or her life. But the yoga instructor scoffed at his friend's decision, stating that it was a big waste of time. That's when I took off my imaginary earrings and lee press on nails and prepared for a debate on education versus a career in musical theater.

It didn't help that the Iranian girl next to me, who just happened to be a second year law student at DePaul, agreed with all of the yogi's anti-education rants. She just sat there, undercutting all of my arguments, especially the one about an education being the ultimate investment and safety net. My mention of her ethnicity will be important later in this entry and shouldn't be taken as a racist remark.

The yogi and the girl told me that there are no safety nets in life, and they used the Enron situation as their only argument. "Those people thought they had their safety net and look what happened to them!"

That really wasn't relevant to the discussion because job security and the pursuit of knowledge are two different things.

To them, waking up in the morning and having lines to memorize is preferable to waking up with a PhD.

I argued that no one can ever take knowledge away from you - unless they had one of those mind-altering machines you see in cheesy sci-fi movies. But in the world of musical theater, you're easily replaceable. Just look at what happened to Patti Lupone in the 1993 production of Sunset Boulevard.

The real kicker was that both the yogi and the girl were minorities. There was a time when African Americans couldn't even GET an education. Iranian women had it a little easier, historically, but not a lot of them make it out of Iran to study in the states. It just boggles my mind how she had the good fortune of being accepted to DePaul's school of law, but felt no pride in that achievement.

So wherever you are, friend of the yogi, I commend you on your smart decision to get an education. Just don't sing in the library while you study because people have been known to hurl various objects at sources of loud noises.