It finally happened.

I have finally signed up for college.

I know that for most people, college is 'the thing' you do after high school. That's 'how it works': high school, four years or so of college, get a job, retire in however many years.

Coming from a self employed family and being homeschooled drilled such notions out of me early on. I realized that just doing 'the thing' that everyone else did was not what I wanted to do, especially when I saw people with mountains of student debt, stuck in a cubicle working a job they hated for the rest of their lives, breaking their backs trying to make their bosses rich.

I wasn't doing that. No way.

So I largely dismissed college for a very long time. It took me a long time to figure out that while what I had learned was valuable, I had gone off the deep end with it. College itself isn't bad; you just need to know what you're doing.

In terms of college,...