{"id":1167,"date":"2020-03-04T18:50:26","date_gmt":"2020-03-04T23:50:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cornelllunatic.com\/?p=1167"},"modified":"2026-06-20T20:51:37","modified_gmt":"2026-06-21T00:51:37","slug":"daddy-issues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cornelllunatic.com\/?p=1167","title":{"rendered":"Daddy Issues"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I came to Cornell, I faced some unexpected challenges. I didn\u2019t expect to have any issues with the daily consumption of excess Adderall. I didn\u2019t expect I\u2019d be facing my own mortality at 10:30 p.m. after a Chem prelim when some strange force within me stopped me while crossing the bridge back to North, forcing my body to turn and having to stop myself from scaling the railings.<\/span><\/p>\n

But the struggle I expected the least was that when I came to Cornell, I would unwittingly find a father.<\/span><\/p>\n

You might think I\u2019d have been glad to find a father. After all, isn\u2019t it the dream of every little boy and girl who grows up happily in a two-parent heteronormative household to be like Jessica, the goth chick from school with two dads?<\/span><\/p>\n

Hannes isn\u2019t like most fathers. First of all, he\u2019s German, and not the good kind of German who happily drink themselves into a warm stupor at a local craft brewery after a long day of precision engineering at the Volkswagen plant. <\/span><\/p>\n

No, Hannes is the kind of German who takes two gap years during which he travels to the Rocky Mountains and learns to slaughter a Bighorn ram with his bare hands. Hannes is the kind of German who adopts you when you sit next to each other in Biology 1610, which he has to take to fulfill medical school requirements. Hannes is the kind of German who is extremely demanding about your time and puts inordinate amounts of pressure on you to follow in his footsteps and become a doctor, even though he\u2019s only four years older than you.<\/span><\/p>\n

When he surprised me with the adoption papers on the third day of class in fall, I thought, \u201cWell, he\u2019s just socially inept and doesn\u2019t know how to make friends in a normal way,\u201d so I signed away my life and rights and Hannes legally became my father. <\/span><\/p>\n

Big mistake.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ever since then, Hannes has been unfairly pressuring me to do well in classes, even though I\u2019m doing as well as he ever did. I even tutored him in Bio. <\/span><\/p>\n

He tells me that if I plan to keep racking up debt at an expensive private school, I had better get a job and work my way through because that\u2019s what he did, even though when he went to college it was significantly cheaper (two or three thousand dollars cheaper every year ahead of me he is). He tells me if I don\u2019t get my act together then he\u2019s withdrawing financial support and it\u2019s up to me to either take on more loans or transfer to a community college.<\/span><\/p>\n

When Hannes met my biological parents, he charmed them with his German good looks. They agreed he was a good match for me, and my dad mentioned after Hannes left that he preferred Hannes over all the other fathers I\u2019ve brought home over the years. My mother told me I\u2019m growing up handsome like Hannes.<\/span><\/p>\n

When Hannes and I meet new people, they tell me I have his eyes. Little do they know that the last thing I want is to continue being his son\u2014having your father as a TA in Cognitive Science is an added difficulty when you\u2019re already having a hard time making friends in a 300-person lecture hall.<\/span><\/p>\n

The worst part of all of this is that my friends have started making fun of me ever since I became a legacy student.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014F. Jonatan<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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