Gregory Koger

Today was my first day of school at the College of Lake County. I was a bit apprehensive about it, considering my disdain for the institutionalized educational system and its social, economic and political functions; but I must say that I was pleasantly surprised and it was better than I expected.

Here I am, attired in the obligatory Λ Λ Λ t-shirt, representing it nerdcore. (Man, what is this post, all 80’s movie references?) My first class was Basic Algebra, since I need to get a good foundational grasp of mathematics and its been so long since I’ve done any higher math. The teacher is an older Vietnamese lady named Mrs. Tran. She seems like a great teacher. She says she’s been teaching math since she was 21, so something like 40+ years. When she began to introduce herself, she said she was from Vietnam and asked the class if anyone was familiar with or knew anything about Vietnam, and I was the only one who raised their hand. Very sad that these college kids know basically nothing about Vietnam, much less the history of U.S. imperialism there. She briefly mentioned coming to the U.S. as a refugee, I don’t know if this was during or after the war or the circumstances or her political views (although she did mention something about the purpose of going to college and of life being to get a better job or make more money, basically to better your individual family through the capitalist system, though I wouldn’t read too much into that since its just a general statement that pretty much anyone in America would say without going into the political implications). She spoke to me at our break time, she asked if I was returning to school, because she could tell I was a little older than the other kids, and I told her basically that I had just got out of prison and wanted to pursue a Ph.D. in Computer Science, and she said she expected that I’d be the best student in her class. I told her I’d try my best. She told us we needed to have a specific graphing calculator for class, and the goddamn thing cost $120! Thats more money out of my financial aid on top of the $400 for books…

Then, since I had about an hour between that class and my next, I went and got a drink and a granola-type bar to eat, and walked around a bit. There were a lot of people there, and it had something of the feel of high school, socially. The classroom feel, though, was completely different than high school. Obviously it was only my first day, but it seemed like the teachers actually treated you like a real person, an adult, and not just some child that needed to be dictated to. So that kind of surprised me about it, just how the student-teacher interaction was much different, enjoyable, and preferable.

My second class was English Composition, and the teacher for that class was a much younger lady - its possible that I’m older than she is, but she’s probably close to my age if not a couple years older. She was extremely cool too, making a lot of jokes (the kind of subtle, intellectual humor I love) and engaging us all in conversation, really advocating and trying to elicit class participation. She mentioned something about being a nerd, so that won a lot of points in my book too Very much looking forward to that class, though I’m still a bit apprehensive about how my prison past is going to be received by the other students. All of the faculty that I’ve mentioned my prison experience to have seemed at least outwardly pretty unfazed by it. There really is something of a feel of respecting “diversity”, that oft-trite word.

Then afterwards I needed to get a new duffel bag, because the cheap-ass free one I had been using ripped, so I stopped at the mall. Checked out if I could buy the much-anticipated PC game Bioshock a day early - its not supposed to go on sale till tomorrow, but some stores had sold early copies. The guys wouldn’t sell me a copy a day early though. And shit, I almost ended up staying awake way too late last night on the night before starting college, because the demo for Bioshock was in the process of being leaked to the internets a day early thanks to some screw-up with FilePlanet. FilePlanet was supposed to have an exclusive pre-download for paying subscribers, which wouldn’t unlock until like 7PM Eastern on Monday August 20th. But some enterprising guys downloaded an unencrypted version of it and put a torrent of it up on The Pirate Bay, so I was up about an hour and a half later than I expected due to that unforeseen, fortuitous event.

Anyhow, after that, I though about finding a tattoo shop to get my Chaos Star finished and look into getting some other things done. I didn’t even think of the significance of the day (first day of college) until I was on the road to the tattoo shop in Libertyville, IL. Great shop, great people - the shop is Liberty Tattoo & Body Piercing . They also have a shop in Antioch, IL, and some assholes in that town were trying to stop them from opening the shop. But they got it open, thankfully. Anyway, the guy who did my Chaos Star touch-up/finish was named Eric, really cool guy.

I originally did the Chaos Star while I was in the middle of doing just over 6 years straight in solitary confinement in seg in prison, covering an old gang tattoo, and it had tremendous personal significance to me. Its not perfectly symmetrical, but he did what he could with what he had to work with, and I think it turned out pretty damn good, considering the circumstances under which I first did it. So it was very fitting that I got it touched-up and finished on my first day of college…