Anyone that knows me is aware that though I'm not a funny person, most everything I do is motivated by the comedy value of the situation. I embrace the ironic and the absurd, and don't take much of anything too seriously. The trouble with this is that I tend to be the only one who finds these things funny. My current realization is that since I wore my high school graduation dress for my college graduation, it now also needs to be worn for my masters. I shared this insight with Bryce, and was reminded of how friends can become more alike over time when he was enthusiastic about the idea. The question is, was this my influence, his, or did we have similar senses of humor to begin with?

Bringing this up led to comparison of our families' reactions to and treatment of our college graduations. For him, it was another forced comparison to his sister. For me, it was justification for my values and priorities. We decided that if fictionalized my family would be a sitcom and his would be an absurdist novel. There's one story from my graduation that I think really illustrates a lot of the tensions between myself and my parents. I told them a year in advance that if they didn't come up to Davis for the ceremony I would never speak to them again. It was stated more as a joke, and I think that's how it was understood, but there was also a sad level of truth to it. I'm the outsider of my family, and my dad really loves to point out that I'm the snob of the group. As much as I know he loves me and is proud of me, he also likes to take me down a notch whenever he can. This combined with the generally negative "can't do it" attitude of my parents and siblings, created a fear that something might "come up", and it would be nothing that I would be allowed to get upset over. That's what really gets me is that with the position I hold within my family I'm not allowed to get mad over things like that, meanwhile I get shit for things I can't control.

Something along these lines about which I'm notoriously bitter is my grandparents. All through college I got guilt trips about visiting them. They lived an hour or so north of me, but I didn't have a car. Whenever Aunt Mary would come to visit, we would drive up to see them. Meanwhile, they would not make the effort to come see me at all. After a few years of this, I no longer felt guilty about it, and just dealt with the way things were. Then, when I had two extra tickets to my graduation, I naturally invited them to come down. Could they make the drive? No. They didn't have any other obligations, just didn't want to drive an hour for the only college graduation any of their grand children would ever be inviting them to. At this point Kris laid into me the same way my parents would have. Like I said, I'm not allowed to get mad over this type of thing. There's nothing quite like being pissed off over the fact that you're not allowed to be pissed off. Luckily Aunts Mary and Terri got upset for me, which at least justified me a little.

Alright, this is running on, but the point is that I am fully aware of my place within my family, and that does not include being proud of myself or expecting any sort of understanding for my point of view. It does include feeling guilty for getting out, trivializing everything that actually matters to me, and wearing the party smile without being condescending. I get it. There are some up sides to living across the country.