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March 13, 2007

ostraschisms

I like to think of myself as supremely comfortable in my own skin, but there have been lapses. So long as humans interact, I suppose, someone will feel like outsider.

The youngest child of five, I experienced outsider status from Day One. Childhood memories are seldom anything but being on the outside, watching the older kids do activities I was denied. Thanksgiving was a metaphor for the life to come. As my siblings grew older, they migrated one-by-one from the kids' table—a card table with paper plates—to the main dining room table, until finally, I presided at the kids' table alone. Apt.

I would feel like an outsider again, of course. Taking care of my dying mom and her household when I was a teenager precluded a normal teenhood. Having nothing to offer but scintillating tales of balanced checkbooks, I would listen with rapt attention while my peers boasted of their exploits. And later on, I would be the White Guy in my neighborhood, forever skewing my sense of racial identity such that no race really feels like my own.

The modern-day version of this is one that took me by surprise: class.

I am a poor kid who's done well, and the transition hasn't really taken. Like a fat guy who's lost a lot of weight but still feels like a fat guy, you never really stop feeling like a poor kid. And as such, I'll never be comfortable with my own demographic, that being well-off white folks who work at Microsoft.

They're insane. These are people who want for nothing materially, who insist on taking their BMWs to the dealership in order to get the tires replaced, who make six figures a year for making sure the words "Server" and "2003" have a non-breaking space between them in documentation that is never read, who can complain with a straight face that their annual bonus of cash and stock was less than they truly deserved. At my best, I merely despise them. They're soulless, joyless fucks with an insatiable, positively deranged sense of entitlement.

They are why I moved to the peninsula. I wanted to be with...not "my people," per se, but people not so objectionable. People whose senses of self and reality have not been mutated by money. A funny thing happened on my way home, though. I am now the Rich Guy. And man, am I ever unprepared for this.

I am not rich by metrics that do not include the Third World, but try telling that to someone deeply thankful for a job that pays a fourth as much as mine. The gap is inconceivable to him. To him, I might as well be a millionaire. A billionaire.

And so I am treated differently. My stuff is broken without comment, even stolen, because I can afford to replace it. Contractors bid huge, which is annoying, and anything I purchase is pointed out as evidence of my differentiating richness. That's just people being jackasses; I can handle that. But friends seem somehow ashamed of their station in life, which is just intolerable. They even apologize for not being able to afford as much as I can.

It's horrific. If you have any degree of sensitivity at all, you feel self-conscious, sheepish. And I do. I even feel guilty for feeling sheepish. I find myself emphasizing my roots or my 13 year-old car. Or hiring a stranger to watch Ed rather than asking a friend and having to tell them I'm flying off to another football game. It feels like posturing. I loathe it. I am not Condescending Rich Guy. But all it takes for you to be that guy, it turns out, is a popular vote.

posted by john at 06:36 AM  •  permalink