A number of weeks before I turned twenty-eight I began to experience a kind of urgency.

Maybe it had something to do with the fact that twenty-eight is only two years from thirty, or that twenty-seven is fairly close to twenty-five but twenty-eight is not. I began to feel that something wasn’t getting done quickly enough, that I had limited time (even a hundred years is such a small amount of time) and I had to move my ass to get where I was going. Something that couldn’t wait. Something important.

I began to feel that in my life I’d wasted far too many hours on deadening minutiae, and that I need to push hard to catch up. Twenty-two years until I’m fifty, I calculated. Forty-two until seventy. How healthy do I need to be to be pushing forward when I’m seventy and eighty and ninety? I need to be very healthy, I thought. And I simply haven’t come far enough to match the time I’ve used up. Time to move. Only two years until, what, the middle? The middle of what? Too far to go to be moving this slowly.

Who am I kidding? I felt this way long before I got anywhere near twenty-eight. But when I realized I was approaching twenty-eight, it got a lot worse.

When I tilt my head to one side, that all sounds like paranoid emotional workaholic crap. I hear that people have crises at thirty, so I should have one too. Here’s mine, and I’m an early bloomer! Isn’t it pretty?

When I tilt my head to the other side, I know that it’s absolutely true and I have to fucking get with it. There isn’t time for the kind of bullshit mainstream society engages as normal. There are things that need to happen now, and things that need to happen soon, and the clock is ticking on our ability to move them. If I sound like Keanu Reeves in some goddamn movie I guess you’ll just have to deal with it. This is how I feel.

It’s why when I see people sitting on their asses and languishing in the status quo it pisses me off.

It’s why I sometimes burn myself out because I forgot to (read: wasn’t willing to) take a real break. It’s why I get so frustrated when I seem to be slowed down, stalled out, becalmed or confused. Places to go. People to meet. Thoughts to hatch. Miracles to work. How can you just sit there? Aren’t you paying attention? We Americans, we’ve got it good. We can sit warm and cozy inside our fuzzy blanket of money and entitlement and instant gratification letting media and commerce jerk off our pleasure centers, and all the while we’re whining because we can’t quite get our way without expending some effort. Do I sound like a hippie or do I just sound mad?

How can we lay around distracting ourselves when there’s so much that we can do? Must do?

I just don’t understand.

No wonder I’m feeling urgency. I’m overcompensating for my culture.

But is it really overcompensation, or is it exactly what needs to be done?

Bob Poole asked me about my take on America’s educational system and in my attempt to provide him with a coherent response, I blew a gasket. It popped out of my left ear. I have no idea how to put it back. Where the hell does it even go? (I don’t think I have enough cash in my account to hire a mechanic, either.)

I decided to give it pride of place on top of the TV set. It’s kind of a memento, you know? Of frustration.

When I first watched Sir Ken’s TED presentation I just about burst into tears. I was lucky, man. I went to a great school that had a pretty reasonable slot in the budget for arts and theater. (What? You didn’t know I was an arts & theater kid? Have you even been paying attention?) Oh, there were boxes, there was plenty of math and science and there was plenty of “You’d be a Good Kid IF…” But I made out better than most. I was educated in a private, Catholic institution for almost all of my pre-university schooling—there were nuns. There were a lot of smart people, too.

I can’t even grasp what most kids grow up with these days. Kids in public schools deal with way more bullshit than I can even really grasp. (My one year in public school in seventh grade was QUITE enough for me, thanks.) I hear more horror stories about misguided teachers wantonly crushing the spirits of brilliant, creative, unorthodox-and-amazing children than you could shake a stick at. But it’s the school system I want to shake a stick at. Because we’re all but living in the dark ages with this industrial crap. We’re not training kids to work in factories anymore, people. They need to be prepared for the real world—the one we have now, and the one after that, and the one after that. They need to be flexible and wise. They need to be strong and compassionate and brave. They need to be warriors of the soul, leaders who take us forward, voices that challenge us to grow.

And we’re teaching them to put down their brains and do everything the same.

It makes me itch all over just thinking about it. And I could rant forever, but I’m going to stop here and point you to Bob’s post (wherein the rest of my diatribe is contained). Go read what we had to say.

You haven’t seen the end of this one.