Every conversation with family friends and relatives could
be avoided by handing them a card with 4 or 5 answers on the card. Family
reunions, birthdays, work gatherings, etc it doesn’t matter, it’s always the
same few questions. ‘How are you? What year [of school] are you in? Where do
you go? What do you study? What do you want to be?’ These kinds of questions
are polite, expected, but they don’t carry any weight. They’re plain yogurt. Not bad necessarily,
but it just isn’t that interesting or memorable. The trouble too is that these
questions put me, and I assume everyone my age, in really weird situations.
Plain questions deserve plain answers. ‘Good. I’m a graduate. I graduated from
Juniata, but I go to CMU. I’m in an Entertainment Technology program. I want to
either direct music videos or maybe work in special effects.’ These are the
answers relatives expect. A few short polite questions, a few short polite
answers, and both parties can move on, to the next almost identical conversation.
The issue I have with this formula is that, in the context of my life, these vanilla questions are actually quite terrifying. Until I finally got accepted into Carnegie Mellon, I was a wreck. I had no idea where I would go to graduate or even if I would get in anywhere. I spent four years working as an undergraduate; applying to graduate school was the first test to see if I had actually accomplished anything during that time. To me, every rejection was as though a committee had come and examined all the choices in my life over the last 4 years and summarily decided that I had fucked everything up. It was without a doubt the most stressful experience of my entire life.
But whenever I was asked what I would do after graduation, I simply replied that I hoped to get into graduate school and listed my top two choices.
That is why I hate these questions. They aren’t worthy of the struggle, the emotion, the hope that is truly behind the answers given. Moreover, the environment and nature of the question actively represses the truth of the answer. It would be uncouth to breakdown and tell a distance Aunt how the only time in my life that I’ve felt completely helpless, since being hit by a car at 8 years old, was after receiving my Columbia rejection letter. I can’t remark to my uncle over Thanksgiving gravy that I hate revealing my desire to direct films because of how potent my fear of failure is.
These questions are polite questions wrapped around intimate and honest answers; it’s not fair to force our remarks into one sentence blurbs appropriate for a dinner party.
