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Show 195 job "like everyone else" in the first place, and as my dad's health was deteriorating she had become less understanding. He was getting up in years and she would have liked my help back in Utah County making sure that Palmer Property Association was running smoothly. She had a point. Some of the things my dad used to do-climbing on rooftops, lifting abandoned materials from the basement, and so on, he no longer could. He was always feeling three moves behind. Maybe with some help, he'd have been able to retire. My mom asked: "Why do you think you need go to graduate school? Do you think you're so much smarter than the rest of us?" She had been asking variations on that question since I told her I was going, and I was used to ignoring her. She was a smart woman, but she was also a woman who owned a giant foam hand that read "Mitts for Mitt" which had come in the mail along with what looked exactly like a credit card, with my mom's embossed name, member number, and expiration date, declaring her a 2008 Mitt Romney presidential campaign supporter. But that question was starting to wear on me. I think her comments were cutting sharper because my relationship to school was, for the first time in my life, ambivalent. I was fatigued and becoming cynical. My best friend killed himself a couple months before, and I made it through the semester without taking time off, which I felt was an insult to him. I started to transfer my self-loathing to those in the classroom, and even though I could rationalize that away later, I did not find a way to escape the guilt and anger and contempt I associated with graduate school. |