I guess the international travel was not so unexpected. I am living in Winnipeg, Ontario, but my family lives in Illinois. It's none of their business, but my parents and grandparents love to make disparaging comments about my choice to live in Canada. Their expert analysis is that I am far too liberal to be a part of their family if I choose to live in Canada!
The first and last good thing to happen to me on the trip was being bumped to business class on the way down. I try to eat and drink as much classy booze and food as possible, so as to feel like I've made a profit on the airfare. Yes, that's some sick logic; I know.
So my first experience upon arriving at my grandmother's huge house was having my uncle shove a bottle of IPA in my hand and declare, "Our international contingent is here! This beer's from India, Cait! So you'll like it better than our nasty American stuff!"
"I can see Detroit from my town," I tell him. "It's barely international." But he is not the sort of person who listens to what his nieces, or any female, says, and he is not listening to me. I stare at the IPA. I hate the taste of IPA. It reminds me of stale pee and college bathroom.
My mother, whom I see every second or third weekend when she comes to Winnipeg, has apparently been talking about me and my incomplete college degree to some rather nefarious cousins of mine, who live in California. One of them, the portly and arrogant Bria, accosts me while I'm trying to get rid of the IPA and find some amber or, better still, tequila.
"So you've dropped out of school, huh?" she asks. Bria, who is one year younger than me and is majoring in something fancy-sounding that means nothing more than "business and PR", actually has chocolate on her face. A fat girl with chocolate on her face.
"I'm taking some time off, yeah," I say. She nods with these raised eyebrows and the chocolate cracks slightly. It's been there for a while.
"You know, everyone associates having no college degree with failure nowadays," she says. "You should really think about re-enrolling."
"I can't see why not finishing a college degree implies failure," I retort, even though I know I shouldn't. Why should I argue with a girl whose GPA is probably about half of mine and who has probably drunk at least six bottles of nasty-ass IPA in the past 90 minutes?
"There are plenty of successful people who don't have degrees," I continue, while my brain yells, STOP! "I mean, if I were to get a degree in something pointless and spend the rest of my life working in a retail store because I have no real skills, how is that better than working from the age of 17 and developing a real career?" Bria probably catches the fact that I'm referring to her job as a sales chick at the Buckle.
"Well, put it this way," she begins. "Your parents sent you to a private school. A really expensive private school. You were there for three years and it cost a shit-ton. Which you'll have to pay off. How to you expect to make a profit on that investment without the degree to show for it?"
And there in lies half the problem – Bria is jealous because I went to a "name" school and she didn't. And it's not even like I enjoyed going there or respected its snobbery. She'd integrated her hatred for my unfished degree, my name-school and her basic awfulness into one lame attempt at insulting me. I'm not surprised to hear this from her, because my equally evil aunts say the same things and she's integrated all of their bullshit into her own rhetoric.
"You're probably right, Bria," I say. "I'm a hugio failure with no future. By the way, sunshine. You have some food on your face."
By this time, I'd drunk about two thirds of the IPA. My taste-buds were dying. Later, I heard much the same thing from another cousin, but she wanted to know why I'd not enrolled in college in Canada when I'd moved up there. Um, becuase I don't want to go to college anymore!
Why must family reunions suck so much? There was aproximately nothing good to come of the entire weekend. And they wonder why I choose to live across an international border from them!
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