don't know why

It's hard to not associate my university history with a very palpable sense of embarrassment. I don't embarrass easily. Others may look back at their time in college and reminisce with certain bodily tangibles, laughter or blood or sweat or cum or whiskey.

As a twenty-year-old waitress cum pre-med student put it so keenly on her Facebook profile, "this IS the time of my life and im going to live every minute of it. LIVE...and not going to accept anything less than amazing. the world isn't ready for what im about to bring it:)" She typifies this cocktail: 10 parts sugar, 8 parts determination, 5 parts optimism, and 90 parts unflappable partygirl. No parts bitter, no parts failure or failed, no parts of her jaded and trod upon ego to drag around as if it were chained around her ankle bracelet tattoo.

No, upon the thought of it, my overall paralyzing feeling is one of simultaneous nausea, tears, mixed with the occasional shudder. It's happening right now. It just happened again. It's going to keep happening. Such a corporeal response must be the universal symptom for not being honest with one's self. See that? That third-person-shift just relieved this author of a bit of responsibility, like a little puppy relieving itself all over one's shoe, both equally as productive.

My father should be saying that I never set myself up for success when it came to furthering my education. Instead, he says, "Do you believe it's wise to finish that last year? Spending money on books and tuition, increasing your student loans, decreasing your 60-hour-work week in order to accommodate full-time classes, all these things will do nothing to help your financial situation. Can you really afford to go back to school?" This comes from a man who, two years into his BS in Engineering, dropped out of his state university to marry my mother and move to a more northern part of the state. She once explained to me that the G.I. Bill was to blame, that his veteran compensation was not enough to cover his tuition. Wikipedia and Google force me to doubt this. He told me about the time he first killed someone in Vietnam, on his 19th birthday. He's still a stubborn Republican. I wonder how it all relates.

I currently make more money than my mother; this has been the case over the past four years despite my lack of degree and overall life experience. She is happy. She also informs me that it's not in my best interest to complete my degree. During my childhood, she was a stay-at-home mom that always kept a part-time job in order to keep up with the town talk and brag along with the other mother coworkers. She attended all of my awards ceremonies, my choir concerts, my school plays, my soccer games, my prom court coronation. However, her true calling is hair; we have a beautician's chair as a part of a mock set-up downstairs in the basement. Before we moved to the place I call my hometown, we lived in a city closer to the excitement and bustle of my region, where I was born, where my mother had her own chair at a real hairdresser's shop. On the phone, she regales stories about some of the other women at her current office, the ones my age who are having babies and/or getting married, the ones going to technical school during their nights and weekends to complete their year or two-year vocational programs. They've really put their life together. They're thinking about buying a house only about twenty-five minutes outside of the city, right by so-and-so's farm a few miles from Highway 41.

My father rarely made an appearance at my high school events; he supported my endeavors but was always the breadwinner and workaholic that I know him to be now. He worked late. He still does. I'm not quite sure what all I want for myself when I'm 58 and nearing retirement, but I'm sure that forty years of working late is not one of them.

Let's grant some room for error here, but I feel I've got a firm grasp of who I came from, of where I came from, of why I came from. First, there's a Vietnam Vet cum businessman whose PTSD is so evident through his unmatched work ethic that he might as well wear a gold pin with that acronym in fancy script on his suspenders along with his little yellow ribbon pin, his American flag pin, his calvary unit emblem pin. Then, there's that amiable, pretty woman with a maternal instinct nearly ursine in nature who makes other people pretty for fun.

This is obviously not a complete entry. Please note that it took me until 5-17-07 to post this. Please also note how many times I was able to slip the word "cum" into this post.