There's this Instagram reel going around, where someone's getting all nostalgic about school days. It has been 21 years since I finished school and just thinking about the start of the school year still gives me the shivers.

To this very day, the smell of the earth at the beginning of fall has this weird effect on me—it makes me sick. It's like a reminder of those last days of summer, when we'd reluctantly pack up from our summer house and head back to the city. Don't get me wrong, it's not like I had the time of my life during summer breaks. There wasn't much excitement; my parents didn't take me away on fancy vacations, there weren't birthday parties happening every other day, or playground or playdates, or Play Station… The only “play” that existed back then was playdough and Playboy (that somehow found its way into our hands). And the only use of play came in the form of “go play outside”, shouted from the top of my mother’s lungs.

Anyhow, the point I'm getting at here is that summer wasn't quite the blast it is for kids today. Fast forward thirty years, summer is still the same for parents though: Dreadful!

But let's circle back to our original topic—school, though I must admit, a blog post on summer and family vacations is definitely in order.

Speaking of reels, I caught one by Sylvester Stallone talking about college. He said that the purpose of college is “to show a potential employer that you showed up some place four years in a row, completed a series of tasks reasonably well and on time so if he hires you there is a semi decent chance that you’ll show up there every day and not fuck his business up”. Now, Stallone might have a point, but I've got to be honest, I haven't used Pythagoras's theorems or Thales's stuff, let alone Einstein's relativity equation in the past 21 years. So, if school was all about teaching us discipline, couldn't they come up with something more exciting to fill those six long hours? How about giving us two piles of laundry and telling us to fold them flawlessly? Now, that's some useful discipline! Or hand us 20 bucks and ask us to buy lunch ingredients—that could've been a life skill worth learning.

By now, you've probably gathered that I loathed school with a burning passion. Every Sunday night, I'd be sick to my stomach. No, I wasn't faking it; I had a fever every single Sunday for 15 years straight. My mom didn't panic, and we didn't need to have any "talks" or seek help from a "professional." It was just a phase, a phase that decided to stick around for a lifetime. I despised Mondays so much that I consistently moved to countries where Sunday is a regular working day. I'm pretty sure a "professional" would have a field day with that.

Parents, as they often do, kept telling me that I'd miss my school years once I became a grown-up with all these responsibilities. Well, here I am, 21 years later, and I'd willingly take all those Team meetings that could've been emails, the toxic relationships, the laundry folding, the bills, and even the burnout, but I wouldn't touch an hour of solid geometry, physics, or history class about how we fought for independence. On that last one, let's face it, that stuff didn't exactly turn out to be all that useful, did it?