Gradation

"If I’d been burned alive because of bad grades, my parents would have killed me"

- David Sedaris

More:

When school was finished, I went back home, an Ivy League graduate with four years’ worth of dirty laundry and his whole life ahead of him. “What are you going to do now?” my parents asked.

And I said, “Well, I was thinking of washing some of these underpants.”

That took six months. Then I moved on to the shirts.

“Now what?” my parents asked.

And, when I told them I didn’t know, they lost what little patience they had left. “What kind of a community-college answer is that?” my mother said. “You went to the best school there is—how can you not know something?”

And I said, “I don’t know.”

All taken, of course, from this mini-masterpiece.