having said that , my friend jude went to enough college classes to know that , after learning the truth , you are allowed to contradict yourself , and that an intelligent mind can hold contradictions in itself and still stay sane , so here 's my story : my older brother ben and his wife both had jobs in the first of this community 's mega stores back in the early 1980 's , and both were in their first year at the closest can't-decide-what-to-do-with-my-life community college , barely launched free from the diminishing inner-city neighborhood my family lived in then , where class-bounding blue-collar dreams blossomed .