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  • The Paris Review

    For Whom Is the Water Park Fun?

    by Barrett Swanson Jul 03, 2019 10 minutes

    Barrett Swanson attempts to relax and ends up interrogating summertime Americana in the Midwest.

    Noah’s Ark Water Park

    The vacation was a professional recommendation. After two years of pursuing academic tenure at a small university in Wisconsin, an interval during which I served on department committees, advised undergrads, composed new essays, and taught sixteen classes, I had finally reached a point in my life of near-catatonic exhaustion. Granted, I did my best to keep up appearances on campus. Each day I donned a happy pedagogical mask of good cheer and scholastic rectitude, enthusiastically responding to every last student email (Of course I’ll write you another rec letter! Of course I’ll read seventeen chapters of your unfinished fantasy novel!) My use of exclamation points in work emails became worryingly frequent and was perhaps the lone sign of my psychic unraveling. At home, however, I wore my darkness on my sleeve. Evenings I would brood stoically beside the fire, muttering to myself recombinant strings of my most frequent comments on student papers: wrong word, comma splice, fallacy, abstraction. Wrong word, comma splice, fallacy, abstraction. This eerie anthem, whispered under my breath, was enough for my spouse to ask, “Is everything okay?” It wasn’t. Not really.

    At work, my mask started to slip. One student remarked on how I looked so dejected before class, but when the morning bell rang I seemed to “come remarkably to life.” And in my second-year review, one colleague noted that while I had been steadily publishing in Tier 1 journals and earning high marks on my student evaluations, his lone concern for me was one

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