When hard work and a can-do attitude just don't pay off...
This is my relationship with physics right now: I am like a dog... No, better yet, a puppy. I am one of those adorable little puppies that acts like its tongue is magnetically attracted to your face. My owner is physics, and like all puppies I love my owner unconditionally. I've learned how to do everything that my owner has tried to teach me: I can fetch, roll over, shake, play dead, and speak on command. I even know when to get the newspaper or my owner's slippers. It's taken me hours and hours, actually days and days of diligent practice for me to meet all of my owner's expectations, and he still throws new tricks at me, but I work as hard as I can and I learn to do all of those new tricks really well. I've given my owner nothing but unconditional love and my hardest work, and I can do everything he asks of me almost perfectly, but every now and then my owner kicks me. He kicks me really hard and makes me feel like everything I've done to please him means nothing. But I get back up on my feet and I try even harder to learn the tricks my owner teaches me. I practice longer, and promise my owner that I'll try as hard as I can to do better next time. And then he kicks me again. He's kicked me quite a few times now. Once or twice he gave me the smallest pat on the head instead of kicking me, but he went right back to kicking me as hard as before after that. So I hope you can understand why I'm starting to feel cynical about my owner's expectations, and all the work I've been putting myself through to try and meet them. It seems as though my owner has decided that his expectations of me will always been impossible for me to achieve, and that he will always deliberately mislead me. He will always convince me I've done everything that he wants, and then turn right around and kick me for failing to meet his expectations. I've learned that my owner will almost always kick me, regardless of how hard I work to try to please him, so I might as well not try at all.