When I was a kid, growing up in Reseda, garbage collection was much more freeform than it is today. We had several oil drums that we used as garbage cans. My father managed a Standard Oil station and later had his own Chevron service station. For yard clippings, our front yard was basically ivy, we just stuffed it into one of the cans. 

I have previously written about my lack of adequate career orientation in high school and subsequent lack of preparation for college. Well, I went to college anyway. The closest community college to home, Los Angeles Pierce College. I thought it was a good school but one thing I noticed in retrospect was that I learned nothing about doing research. After two and one half years and some time at West Valley Occupational Training, learning about refrigerators and air conditioning, I enrolled at San Fernando Valley State College.

My feeling is that just as with human induced climate change, societal violence has reached a tipping point. I personally doubt that anything can be done to reverse planetary warming. That doesn't mean we should just give up on trying to reach a more rational and efficient, as well as cleaner means of powering our toys. The same with our societal violence. It's the dominant theme in movies, video games and unfortunately in much of our personal interactions.

I was just an average student in grade school (k-12) and had no real aspiration of going to college. I had some strange ideas about college graduates, PHds in particular. Afterall, what was the use of college unless you went all the way. Professors, and other PHds should all speak multiple languages and should be well versed in mathematics as well as the classics. The idea of a Renaissance Man still existed in my imagination. I was not one of them.