A One Percenter’s Education

The Caligula School of Etiquette taught me one thing:  Refined diners eat their French fries with chopsticks.  However, my education taught me so much more than how to manipulate potatoes with ancient utensils.  My education and life experiences were inextricably bound.  I received autocratic lessons in developing superiority, imperious teachings in neglecting those beneath me and learning how to cheat at kickball. 

Every day we listened to flamenco versions of classic heavy metal songs.  When I was three, Mom decided that I was mature enough to play an instrument and enrolled me in ukulele lessons.  My next task was to memorize a song of her choosing and play it note for note. 

Consequences were dire.  If I missed a note, Mom would cover my nose with duct tape and tell me to wiggle my nose like a rabbit.  “Come on, genius,” she would taunt me.  “Make like a rabbit and wiggle your nose.”  This humiliation motivated me to always succeed, no matter the circumstances or the price. 

By age four, I had mastered the ukulele.  I played a concert at Carnegie Hall for the Hawaiian mafia.  Mom exploited my musical gift to bypass the entrance exam and enroll me at the prestigious Mario Kirpatrick Preschool for Young Investors. 

I assumed everybody paid five figures to attend kindergarten.  At the Mario School, we had no grades, tests or teachers.  A cardboard cutout of Mahatma Gandhi “supervised” the classroom.  A soothing voice from the intercom instructed us in counting, basic shapes and understanding capital gains tax loopholes. 

A typical day consisted of an hour of learning to work without structure followed by an hour of being taught how to study without guidance.  Then, another hour of grasping why the individual is more important the group.  Lunch, then thirty minutes of interactive supply and demand on the playground and a nap.  The last hour was devoted to finger painting and diversifying a portfolio. 

After kindergarten, summers weren’t the carefree idle time that other kids had.  I spent my summers at study camps.  Math camp, science retreats, computer asylums.  Camping camp was the most taxing because the Four Seasons hotel didn’t allow room service to the lobby.

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I attended the renowned T. Cobb Tulc School of Revisionist Theories and Entrepreneurship for elementary and middle school.  At Tulc, the faculty introduced me to smoking to relieve stress.  The administration also encouraged smoking as an homage to the school’s humble beginning at the Lübeck cigarette company in Stuttgart, Germany. 

Tulc emphasized the threefold education method; engaging head, heart and hands.  The head represents academics, the heart symbolizes the arts and the hands signify endorsing checks. Tulc devotees insist that the school’s founder was clairvoyant and his opinions the absolute truth.  As a result, the curriculum reflected these truths.

For example, in science we learned about the natural elements. Our periodic table was a picture of firemen trying to put out the Hindenburg after it crashed.

And, in T. Cobb Tulc’s historical paradigm, China didn’t exist until 1894 when the American Frederick Weeks invented the takeout container. 

An average 6^th grade day at Tulc began with the welcome followed by ukulele lessons. (Mom had mapped out my education in utero.)  Then movement, speech and memorization.  The bulk of the day focused on vital entrepreneurial matters such as bill collection, protecting intellectual property and industrial espionage.

The day concluded with the students performing the angulimics dance, choreographed by Tulc himself. In angulimics, the students move haphazardly to dissonant music and try to pick the teacher’s pocket. 

After Tulc, I enrolled at the esteemed Hegel School for Collaborative Learning and Money Laundering.  The Hegel School is unique in that the classrooms have no desks.  Students and teachers sit around an oversized ironing board called the “Hegel Board™.”  When class is ready to begin, the instructor mimics the mating call of the whooping crane.  The students then respond by shouting, “Toodles!” and the discussion starts. 

Any and all subjects are fair game at the Hegel Board™.  From advanced calculus to Russian literature to why Winston Churchill wore a prom dress to his mother’s funeral, we engaged each other as first among equals. 

Whatever the subject, the teacher always steered us toward the main objective:  Hiding cash.  If we discussed Darwinism and the Galápagos tortoise, the teacher brought up shell companies.  If we talked about civil unrest in Hong Kong, the teacher mentioned that Hong Kong also has very cooperative banks to move assets under the radar.

“Ed” only used his first name to avoid detection from the college boards and the IRS. Mr. Ed was fair but strict, brushing me with his tail for a correct answer and biting me when I answered incorrectly.  I never understood why he always called me Wilbur.

Despite Mr. Ed’s masterful tutoring, I still couldn’t score high enough to enroll at the elite universities.  Consequently, Mom had fake credentials made for Mr. Ed and he took the SAT for me.  Nevertheless, the plan failed when Ed was expelled from the testing site for hiding a thesaurus in his feed bag.

So, Mom went with Plan B, obtaining an athletic scholarship.  I had played soccer at Hegel but not well enough to earn a scholarship.

Mom turned to Norbert Canary, a college “side door” businessman with connections to the higher education crème de la crème.  As a result, I secured a place on Harvard’s championship knitting team despite having never picked up a knitting needle.

Nonetheless, this master plan crashed and burned when the FBI arrested Mom for a pump-and-dump investing scheme.  She had lured investors to put their money in Kafka Technologies (“Advancing social networking to its primitive state!”).  Despite having never traded in any market, Kafka stock soared from $0.06 to $88.88 in two months.  Investigators determined the company had no revenue, assets or snack machines.

FBI agents arrested Mom while she attempted to deposit a Mercedes full of cash at a convenience store ATM.  To strike a deal for leniency, Mom told the agents about her scheme with Canary to get me into Harvard.  Canary was arrested and charged with racketeering, money laundering and possession of 4000 lava lamps with intent to distribute.

As a result of the scandal, Harvard took away my scholarship.  Still determined to maintain my status in society’s elite, I redirected my focus. I currently run a YouTube channel dedicated to fixing adult kickball games and have 1.3 million subscribers.  I never wanted to go to college anyway. 

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