She was content to call it mine - so I guess calling it mine in front of her would be okay.  Arriving at the apartment building, we go inside while Junior parks and she sits by the window to look outside before speaking to me again.  "Life...you know how Dostoevsky - was it Dostoevsky?  I can't keep him and Tolstoy and Chekov straight - wrote that 'happy families are all alike, but unhappy families are unhappy in their own way'?  He wasn't wrong in the sentiment, but he was wrong in the degree."  I sat down, myself.  "Life where I live is plenty unhappy, if you're not the right kind of person, and if the Dice God decides he's had enough of people rolling well, so he's replacing your die with a smaller one just because."<br/><br/>Well, here was going to come the tragedy.  Get it out.  "I was the son of a university professor and one of the lower-working masses that fill out the bureaucracy there.  I went to that university, picked what I thought was an alright program - no engineer me, mind you, but I wasn't going to take a job in 'Comparative Religion' - only to graduate in time to see that while I wasn't one of those unfortunates who graduated when the economy imploded, over houses, a story that goes back to before I was even born, the job market hadn't recovered as much as everyone had wanted it to.  So, I graduated...and moved back in to live with my parents."<br/><br/>I sighed.  "It's probably a bit different from you, coming from one of those prestigious Houses where living in the house you were born in is a sign of your status.  For most of us, it's not something to be proud of, at all.  Mom and Dad were<em>pissed</em>that I couldn't get my own place.  And when I did get a job less than a year later, once they figured out to the exact dollar that I was going to be meeting my own expenses, out I went, into the world, to 'make my fortune.'  I think they turned my bedroom into Mom's art studio, even though she's terrible despite the money they keep throwing at art lessons, hoping she's the next Van Gogh when nobody seems to remember Van Gogh only got famous<em>after</em>he died."<br/><br/>That was family.  Friends were next.  "They tell you, at university, that the friends you'll make there will be friends for life.  I'm officially here to tell you, using your own slang, that that is absolute bollocks.  The five guys I hung out with in school are, in order.  One: married and then moved to the coast to pay out his nose in taxes to find a job that pays more than quarters and is still waiting on kids almost ten years married.  Two: moved to Chicago - big city - piling debt on top of debt to afford school and then got shot walking home because of a beef between two rival 'gangstas' and the pittance his university was paying for him didn't let him live anywhere else.  Three: went home to prepare for veterinarian school so he could help his folks in the countryside.  Learned that Dear Old Dad had gotten a case of the leukemia and that they were nearly broke.  Took a job working at the local vet's outfit as an assistant, is still there because an X-ray for a horse is twenty bucks but an X-ray for a man is two thousand.  Four: got accused of sexual misconduct by a girl he hadn't personally seen for over a year, when the cops came to arrest him, found he had a meth lab in his basement.   And last: graduated, moved to Europe, was last heard from living in Amsterdam six years ago with a prostitute.  And<em>he's</em>the success story.  There's<em>one</em>of those five I'm still in touch with, and it's only every few months to say 'hey, how're you doing, we should get a coffee sometime' and then life interjects violently."