I never visited my undergraduate university before getting accepted.  Never even saw it before showing up on campus on the first day of my freshman year.  The main reason I applied, as I recall, is that I read somewhere that students had kidnapped their arch rival’s mascot and stowed him or her away for some time in a closet.  Of course this sounds absolutely awful now.  Shameful.  Illegal.  The kind of thing that blots one’s permanent record.  Not to mention that poor Carolina student stuck in a cramped closet flirting with suffocation under that hot ram’s head mask, drifting in and out of consciousness.  That kind of thing would scar someone for life, I suspect.  Creating life-long aversions to closed closets, animal masks and maybe even costumes of any kind and perhaps even Halloween in general and maybe Greek mythology too given the whole half-man-half-goat thing they had going on. 

And from there it’s not too much of a stretch to speculate that the mascot loses his or her mind if Zamfir seeps through the elevator speakers.  We’re talking full-on, pan flute-triggered PTSD.

Our family is just about squeezed through the microscopic knot hole known in these parts as “the high school admissions process.”  We peered into said knot hole in late summer, jammed our skulls in there a few months ago, and wriggled the rest of our bodies in, twisting and turning, until it felt more like that “naturalist” who recently entered the belly of an anaconda wearing a snake-proof suit.  Only we did not have the benefit of a snake-proof suit.

Reflecting back on these past few months, this process could not be further removed from my own high school “admissions process.”  In fact, those months have been far more challenging than my own college admissions process (see above re Carolina Ram, Pan the Greek God, and Zamfir).  And I think the same is true for my law school admissions process.  I never visited my law school of choice, either, before arriving on day one of first year.  But I did learn how to operate a stick-shift whilst driving solo the 6 hours to law school from my parents’ home.  Pulling a U-Haul trailer, no less, behind my “new” gold Chrysler station wagon.  That is perhaps a story for another day. 

So in light of all this, my wife and I have decided (read: she will learn of this decision for the first time when she reads this blog post, but of course she will whole-heartedly endorse it) to home-school.  Yep, despite the hundreds of hours sunk into this thing by this point, we’re gonna hit the “eject” button.  I refuse to subject the fruit of my loins to the traumatizing effects of goat-headed mascots, Greek Gods of Shepherds, Romanian pan flute musicians, or second longest snakes known to man. Nope.  We will spare our children these stressors that would otherwise undoubtedly lead to long-term neuroses.

So classes are forming now at our newly-established homeschool high school — Zamfir Academy.  Keep an eye out for our commercials on TV.

Thanks for reading.