Mom

Do you remember a few months back when you told me that you wondered
what skills or qualities you'd passed down to your children? I think
you said that all three of us seemed to define ourselves through what
we had and hadn't inherited from Dad--aside from the dreaded Egilson
keep-everything-and-stack-it-to-the-ceiling gene. But I've been
brooding on this for awhile now, and I have somewhat of an answer.

It's hard to break aspects of your personality down and assign them to
each parent: it's especially hard when you look exactly like your dad
(that's an area you could've helped me out a bit more) and share the
same artistic interests, especially music. Yet while Dad and I share
similar interests, we differ a lot in our execution. He's both
hard-working and impractical, and I have both those traits, but I
think I inherited from you a practicality and a broadness of vision
that temper that Wiebe mulishness somewhat.

The fact is, Dad is highly systematized and organized but is less
productive than you are, despite your absense of an overriding
'system.' You seem to intuitively prioritize and carry out what's most
important. Goals get met, shit gets done. That sounds astoundingly
prosaic and banal, but it's actually quite profound, especially when
the workload gets full.

A lot of the success I've been having recently in school, the marks
and awards (not to mention just getting through it) comes from your
straightforwardness and practicality. It's a strange paradox, to
approach something as ethereal and subjective as literature with the
mentality of a working-class Hillary Clinton supporter. But it's the
approach that allows me to get my assignments done on time and still
enjoy the work itself. Too many of my classmates, most from much
wealthier families, get hung up on a fashionable ideology or become
obscurantist snobs who champion books they think make them look smart.
My advantage over them is that I still love what I do.

I've left out the other two traits I got (mostly) from you, namely a
love of reading and a decent enough intelligence. But that's
self-evident.

No one likes to belabour their indebtedness to their parents, so I'll
just say: thanks.