Quitter

Over the past week I have been talking myself into quitting. I’m not a quitter. I hate quitting. Because to me, quitting = failure. And I am scared of failure more than anything ever. You know what though, it’s a personal issue and it doesn’t transfer to other people, because it’s not like I see people quitting things and think they’re failures, so I don’t know what it is. I just have really high, possibly unrealistic standards for myself. So while I go around telling people that they should quit things that make them crazy, I keep on with the crazy making in my own life because I don’t want to be a failure.

One time in college I took a class called differential equations. And if you ever have to take a class with a name like differential equations, I highly recommend doing it at a community college if you can. For one thing, you can make a C and when it transfers to your college of choice, it’s pass/fail and doesn’t effect your grade point average. I had been burned previously by teachers with accents I couldn’t understand, so I chose a Dr. Wilson for my differential equations class – thinking he’d be better suited for my understanding that a Dr. Chen or Dr. Too-many consonant-and-not-enough-vowels would. Well, Dr. Wilson sucked and for the record he also had an accent, but it was Austrailian or something. He sucked hard. He sucked so hard that even as I struggled through the course, I was headed for an F, not a D or a C, but an F. I had to do what’s called a Q-drop. Where Q=quit. And I felt like I was walking around with a giant Q on my forehead for the next week or so.

Well, as it turns out, Dr. Wilson HAD sucked so hard that out of a class of 24 people. 19 Q-dropped. 19! 79% of the people in that room had decided that this guy sucked so hard at teaching that rather than sludge through and teach themselves and make it out the other side, they’d consider the money spent on tuition as a lesson learned and try again with someone else. And of the ones left? Half made Ds or Fs, which in my major would have meant I had to take it over again anyway. I had made the right decision, but at the time it felt horrible.

And that’s what I’m doing right now. I am deciding not to take the home inspectors test. I have been looking over the practice stuff I have, and it is just too detailed and too code-specific for me to adequately study for the test and pass by the 18th. What was originally the optimal answer to my problems has become a much less sensible choice. So I'm giving up. I quit.