I had an
epiphany this
weekend.
I was talking to one of the people in my improv class with whom I've struck a friendship. Whenever we would get together as a group after class if asked where he went to university, he'd say, "Oh, this podunk little school." We were talking and he mentioned he took a year off from school, but still had many friends involved in the theater there. So he took the train one night to see his friends who were involved in Hasty Pudding.
At that point I said, "Hasty Pudding? That's the Harvard parody group, isn't it?"
"Uh, yeah"
"So you attended that little red schoolhouse up from MIT?"
"Oh, MIT?", he said, "The other Cambridge college of note?"
In any case, it turned out that this guy is from old money, blah, blah, blah.
On the drive home I started thinking about that, and began to list the people out here in Seattle that I know. Out of about the 30 or so people I know, about 80+% are degreed from one of the Ivy Leagues and almost everyone I know, comes from at least the Upper Middle Class.
On Saturday afternoon, I went to a restaurant to wait on a friend, and I started thinking about how it is that I get along with these people so well, and our conversations are so rich if there is this tremendous cultural gap between us? I mean, here I am, graduated from a state university out in the middle of rural Pennsylvania, growing up lower to middle middle class. I should have nothing in common with these people whatsoever.
It's likely that around this point in my internal monologue, that I realize that I'm sitting in an outdoor cafe reading the New York Times Review of Books with a glass of Pinot Noir and a bottle of San Pellegrino Water, and I think, "Holy shit, how did I get to be so messed up?"
Eventually, the thought faded, the wine was sweet, the water was nice and cold, the review I was reading was generally insightful and genuinely entertaining. In crept the realization, that life as a former member of the Privileged Poor, and now as a member of the Technocracy, is not so bad-- and if it is-- at least it's not boring.