Most have already heard that Kurt Vonnegut passed away last night. I was working through my political stuff before coming across it. It kind of knocked me back a bit. Here’s one of the authors I read in high school (which I know was a long time ago), but still, to hear that someone who’d put such interesting, and sometimes twisted, ideas into my head had died kind of shakes you a bit. I think I came to appreciate Slaughterhouse V many years after I’d read it. It was a fun story but also had some deep thoughts to it, and not in a Jack Handy type of way.

While reading the NY Times obit on Mr. Vonnegut, I was struck by this paragraph, on the 2nd web page of the article:

In Chicago, Mr. Vonnegut worked as a police reporter for the Chicago City News Bureau. He also studied for a master’s degree in anthropology at the University of Chicago, writing a thesis on “The Fluctuations Between Good and Evil in Simple Tales.” It was rejected unanimously by the faculty. (The university finally awarded him a degree almost a quarter of a century later, allowing him to use his novel “Cat’s Cradle” as his thesis.)
It sounded a bit like me and what I want to do. Before World War II, Vonnegut had gone to what was to become Carnegie Mellon University to study mechanical engineering. After war service, he then turned to the above quoted part of his life. I went to school for computer science, had a career in that and then returned to school for anthropology (an MA earned in 2003) over a decade later. While in politics now, writing has always appealed to me and I still want to move in that direction. Vonnegut, even in death, may be causing me to reevaluate yet again.