Dead Fit - Prologue. Prologue

Prologue

If you ask my opinion, school really fell short of preparing me to face the realities of life. Honestly, I don't have a bad attitude about learning. It's just that some parts of America’s educational system seem to be rather pointless.

Take math class, for instance. The worst offender of irreverent education has got to be forcing students to learn how to solve story problems. At my school, the story problems we learned to solve have had absolutely no practical application to my life.

If Bob can paint a fence in 2 hours and Sue can paint a fence in 1 hour, how long will it take for them to paint the fence together?

Can’t Bob and Sue just hire an illegal immigrant to paint the fence?

Two trains leave Kearney, Nebraska at the same time. Train A is headed west at 55 miles per hour and Train B is headed east at 40 miles per hour. How many hours after they leave will Train A have traveled twice as far as Train B?

Where in the hell is Kearney and don’t they have airplanes there?

Apparently, the sadists who wrote story problems like those live in a vacuum, where all the problems of the world can simply be solved with algebraic formulas. Now that I’m done with school and have some real-life experience under my belt, I’m convinced I can help teachers write more interesting story problems based on reality.

If a bullet travels at 150 miles per hour and you can run 8 miles per hour, how soon after a gun is fired can you expect to die?

Or better yet, stories that deal with love always get students to pay attention.

At age 22, you finally have the balls to come out of the closet and start dating. If most straight boys start dating at 16 and have their hearts broken at least once by 18, at what age can you expect your heart to be crushed?

To be entirely fair to the educational system, I am willing to take some responsibility for getting myself into the mess. After all, I was the one who fell for a man with a criminal connection. Rather than run like hell when I found out, I stuck around, foolishly thinking I could fix the situation. I would have just stayed in the closet if I’d known falling in love could be more painful than being alone.

And then there was my mistake of trying to be socially responsible. Knowing what I know now, I say to hell with altruism if it puts your life in danger. That probably sounds harsh, but I can be a bit of a mercenary when it comes to my own safety. Who would have thought that by making a charitable donation, I would drive someone else to homicide?

While I guess I can’t blame the educational system entirely for my problems, I think school could have prepared me to deal with real life a little better.

But at least I’m still here to tell about it.