!!! I HATE SCHOOL !!!

Okay, this column was supposed to be written last week, so you're going to get an abbreviated version of it. Maybe next year, you'll get the whole story.

I didn't just hate school when I was a kid. I still hate school with a fiery passion even though I last stepped foot in a classroom as a student over 12 years ago. I feel such pity for kids when they have to go back to school. When I was a kid, the end of August was met with such dread that words cannot describe it. But instead of empathizing with their pain, I actually feel like pointing and laughing at the kids in the school supplies aisle "Ha Ha - You have to go back to school and I don't!" Cruel, I know. It's passion, I tell ya!

My parents, thinking they were doing me a favor, sent me to Catholic school for K-8. I'm convinced that my feelings for school were formed from that experience.

I was at a little party the other day and was doing makeup on a third grader named Kayley. I asked her if she liked school. She said she definitely did not! Good answer!

I told her that he greatest thing I learned in third grade was:

Do not brush my hair in Miss Cafarelli's class.

I was actually yelled at for quickly taking out my brush and running it through my long hair, which tended to tangle. Not during class, mind you. During a break. But Miss Cafarelli, at about 30 years old, wore a wig, and I don't think it was for medical reasons. So I think she was jealous.

I went to public high school, where I actually learned some stuff, like how to say "whale" and "shark" in French, how hot young Robert Redford was in The Great Gatsby, and just how bad I am at math.

Then came college. The horror of horrors in my school life. I still have a recurring nightmare about college - it's time to take the final and I realized that I never went to the class. I still sometimes don't believe that I have a diploma! Here's what I learned in college:

- More than I ever wanted to know about the script for Raiders of the Lost Ark (we studied it for a whole semester in a screenwriting class - awesome!)

- The weird idiosyncrasies of the WKYC on-air talent when my professor was working there

- Just how gross dissecting a fetal pig can be (note: VERY GROSS)

- My Gothic and Northern Renaissance art history professor liked to reference paintings' and statues' "naughty bits." His classes were hella boring, but I tolerated him better with the Monty Python references.

- And oddly, I learned how the kidneys work (Na+ and K+ balance), which I've needed to explain numerous times when people in my family have had blood pressure issues. Makes me sound smart. But not really.

Oh, and I also wrote a sitcom based on Othello (yes! Othello the Sitcom!) that featured Ted Turner and Jane Fonda, the Home & Garden Channel, and Wisconsin Badgers boxer shorts. I HAVE to find that script!

Too bad the rest of it sucked big time.


Anyway, next year when the end of summer nauseous school feelings come back again, I will give more details....there's a lot more where that came from!!!