An Elitist Horse of a Different Color
Hello, faithful readers. It's been an obscenely long time. I'm sure that you have many questions, such as "Where the hell have you been?" or "Why isn't this blog about the second half of your Mexico trip?" Good for you. Remember, there are no stupid questions.
I go to Yale. You know this. I have articulated in previous blogs my extreme and plentiful love for my school, but there are a few things that I feel the need to address in the form of a lengthy diatribe involving bitter sarcasm and thinly veiled examples of my own real life experiences. Oh goody, you're excited.
It's no secret that I come from a rural area-the foothillls of the Appalachian Mountains in East Tennessee. It's an area filled with incredible contrasts, from the beautifully furnished cabins atop the hillsides to the sadly dingy single wide trailers, the front yards filled with dirty and broken children's toys, in the lower elevations. I went to school with some big fish in our small
Gatlinburg pond-daughters of head honcho developers, children of cabin company owners, hell even the school superintendent's kid had a hand in my school social life...she was my teacher in 8th grade. While most of these people were not the most pleasant specimens of man, we commoners dealt with them as a necessity of life. The wealthier girls scrambled to buy the latest designer bags, batting their heavily mascara caked eyelashes at the Belk cashiers who wrapped up their $300 Louis Vuitton or Dooney and Bourke for safekeeping on its journey to be exhibited on Gatlinburg Pittman High School desks. You really weren't anybody if you didn't carry a designer purse, or at least a really good fake one for a season or two. The boys displayed their wealth differently, with shiny rims on their Mustangs (Mustangs were huge at GP for some reason), and ridiculouslyfuckingloud speakers that shook your spine if you were unfortunate enough to have to sit in the back seat of their cars. I won't lie, I scrambled to buy that designer bag (I shamefully spent far more than I would care to admit on purses in high school), and date that obnoxious guy with the spinal disk displacing subs, but I tried not to get caught up in the blatant classism that dominated my school-there was a vast schism between the girls with the D&B's and the kids who sat in the back and wore the same clothes to school nearly every day because they couldn't afford anything else.
There's no getting around it-teenagers are assholes. Some of the most zealous social climbers you will ever meet, they step on any toes in the way of the coveted lunch table, or highly admired social events, matter of fact, the more toes the better. Some of the cruelest displays of human behavior I have ever witnessed occurred right before my eyes in the manner of tricking the poor girl in class into thinking one of the varsity basketball players wanted to take her to prom, or forming fake friendships with the kid who smelled a little bad because he literally slept in his car for lack of better accommodations, only to make fun of him afterward and high five all around in self congratulatory celebration. My family makes a nice living now that they have a growing business and have made a name for themselves in the community, but it wasn't always that way. I remember being that girl, the one who bought her clothes at the thrift shop or Wal-Mart because it was cheap, or the one who got embarrassed when her parents picked her up from school because they did so in a super ghetto Mazda Protoge with a dent in the side from the time her mom got mad and threw a bowl at her dad's car. I could relate to the less affluent kids in high school because up until rather recently, I had been one of them.
When I got into Yale, I was ecstatic. A light at the end of the tunnel, Yale was my idealistic paradise, filled with people who cared about the environment, who liked you for your intellect not your designer purse, and maybe even voted Democrat every once in a while (a stretch, I know). To some extent, Yale met my expectations. But as time wore on, I began to pick up on a different type of elitism...intellectual elitism. "You didn't learn Calculus when you were five?" "Your most exciting guest speaker was Bruce Pearl, and you didn't even have a speaker at graduation who wasn't a member of the student body? ""You pronounce Kant like can't? Is that a joke?!" "What private school did you go to? Oh...well uh, where are you from? Oh. OH. Right. Well I know some really rich people in Nashville...you don't know them because you actually live in Bum Fuck Nowhere in the mountains? Oh. That's cool that your parents hike for a living, my obscenely successful parents would love to have free time to do recreational activities. Of course that would mean that I might even have to fill out one of those horrible forms...what are they called? FAFSAs? Ugh. Financial aid gives me hives."
I quickly retired my Dooney and Bourke and set about trying to learn about this disgustingly fascinating creature-the Privileged Legacy. You see, being of the upper crust isn't easy. You have to keep up with maintenance on all four of your homes (don't be ridiculous, Tara, we had to sell one because of this terrible recession...no not the one in Rome, the other one. No, not the beach house. The one in Palm Beach. Terrible ordeal.), you have to send your children to the best schools $40,000 a year can buy, and push them to be at least 10 times more successful than you were at their age. "You don't have a BlackBerry? Why not? Why don't you need it...haven't you founded your own non-profit yet?" It's an interesting breed, the P.L. They're not just extraordinarily well off, they're also incredibly intelligent, so their massive intellects combined with immaculate breeding (fluency in Latin by sophomore year in high school, working knowledge of all levels of classic lit from every major time period, and a couple of really nice suits), they are power houses of superiority. I remember talking to a classmate last year, trying to hard to understand how he could truly believe he was the most intelligent person he knew. Another incident ended in my finding out he had stocked his iPod with a lot of really cool, diverse music solely for show, so that when someone scrolled though his music they'd think he was a fun and musically worldly human being. Who are these people?!
After beating my head against a wall for being the dumbest hick at Yale, someone who mispronounces names of famous authors because she's only ever seen them in writing, can't name all the members of the House by looking at them, and doesn't remember logarithms because, well, she didn't actually learn about them in school, I finally got it. I started seeing the cracks in the porcelain faces of these people I envied so much, starting with their families. The relationship a P.L. has with his/her family is often a functional one, but (sadly) rarely more than that. Parents serve to pay your way through life until you get a job of your own, a favor you repay by becoming them when you grow up, starting with getting in to an Ivy, of course. Preferably their alma mater. I have heard countless classmates talk about their future careers, only to find out that they'd picked them based solely on their average incomes. The next generation of 15 hour a day work fiends sits next to me in lecture, takes on 50 extracurriculars as resume padders, and drinks until he passes out, unaware for a few hours of the pressure squeezing every last drop of dignity and creativity from his system until he's ready to be a man.
There are some P.L.s who aspire to be politicians. They live in a fantasy world filled with intellectuals of the same caliber, so they never really have to interact with the real world, a skill I'm going to go out on a limb and say might be essential for enacting real political change. The political organization meetings they go to consist of a bunch of really smart and well informed kids sitting around debating situations they cannot possibly fathom because they aren't part of the scenery outside their Range Rover's window. Every once in awhile they'll go outside and spend an hour at a soup kitchen, or give change to the Flower Lady, and for them that's enough.
It takes a special kind of person to think being at Yale is no big deal-someone who's spoiled. Certainly, someone who has vast expectations placed on his shoulders, a head full of memorized facts and countless pages of nicely written fiction, and a working understanding of economics, but a child all the same. Someone who has never had to choose between field trips and new clothes, who has never used a food stamp, and who has never heard the words "We're going to have a meager Christmas this year, sweetie." Someone who has never had to make their own way in the world without the family name getting a well manicured foot in the door, who has never participated in a cause because it was something they really believed in, not because they stood to gain anything but personal fulfillment. A baby, who stands alone at parties filled with strangers because Daddy's money won't help him here, who sits silently when good music is discussed because he hasn't memorized what to say in this situation, and dares utter the words, "Yale isn't really a big deal...it's just kind of expected" without realizing how ignorant he really is about the world around him, and how damn close he was to being born into a trailer trash family in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains.
I'm definitely not saying that everyone at Yale is like this. There are a lot of kids here who work incredibly hard for what they've got, and I admire them completely. There are also a lot of kids who are legacies, or very affluent, or both, who are fantastically down to earth and fun to be around. However, the spoiled Privileged Legacy is certainly a prevalent character on the Yale scene, and was a huge part of my decision to let go of my doctor/lawyer dream and major in something that will barely keep bread on the table, but will make me happy and fulfilled as an influential citizen of the world. I would never want to do my children the disservice that my classmates' parents have done them-so much fantastic education, no real world in which to apply it. A life of love and satisfaction trumps one of nice cars and crisp suits any day of the week.
T.
I go to Yale. You know this. I have articulated in previous blogs my extreme and plentiful love for my school, but there are a few things that I feel the need to address in the form of a lengthy diatribe involving bitter sarcasm and thinly veiled examples of my own real life experiences. Oh goody, you're excited.
It's no secret that I come from a rural area-the foothillls of the Appalachian Mountains in East Tennessee. It's an area filled with incredible contrasts, from the beautifully furnished cabins atop the hillsides to the sadly dingy single wide trailers, the front yards filled with dirty and broken children's toys, in the lower elevations. I went to school with some big fish in our small
Gatlinburg pond-daughters of head honcho developers, children of cabin company owners, hell even the school superintendent's kid had a hand in my school social life...she was my teacher in 8th grade. While most of these people were not the most pleasant specimens of man, we commoners dealt with them as a necessity of life. The wealthier girls scrambled to buy the latest designer bags, batting their heavily mascara caked eyelashes at the Belk cashiers who wrapped up their $300 Louis Vuitton or Dooney and Bourke for safekeeping on its journey to be exhibited on Gatlinburg Pittman High School desks. You really weren't anybody if you didn't carry a designer purse, or at least a really good fake one for a season or two. The boys displayed their wealth differently, with shiny rims on their Mustangs (Mustangs were huge at GP for some reason), and ridiculouslyfuckingloud speakers that shook your spine if you were unfortunate enough to have to sit in the back seat of their cars. I won't lie, I scrambled to buy that designer bag (I shamefully spent far more than I would care to admit on purses in high school), and date that obnoxious guy with the spinal disk displacing subs, but I tried not to get caught up in the blatant classism that dominated my school-there was a vast schism between the girls with the D&B's and the kids who sat in the back and wore the same clothes to school nearly every day because they couldn't afford anything else.
There's no getting around it-teenagers are assholes. Some of the most zealous social climbers you will ever meet, they step on any toes in the way of the coveted lunch table, or highly admired social events, matter of fact, the more toes the better. Some of the cruelest displays of human behavior I have ever witnessed occurred right before my eyes in the manner of tricking the poor girl in class into thinking one of the varsity basketball players wanted to take her to prom, or forming fake friendships with the kid who smelled a little bad because he literally slept in his car for lack of better accommodations, only to make fun of him afterward and high five all around in self congratulatory celebration. My family makes a nice living now that they have a growing business and have made a name for themselves in the community, but it wasn't always that way. I remember being that girl, the one who bought her clothes at the thrift shop or Wal-Mart because it was cheap, or the one who got embarrassed when her parents picked her up from school because they did so in a super ghetto Mazda Protoge with a dent in the side from the time her mom got mad and threw a bowl at her dad's car. I could relate to the less affluent kids in high school because up until rather recently, I had been one of them.
When I got into Yale, I was ecstatic. A light at the end of the tunnel, Yale was my idealistic paradise, filled with people who cared about the environment, who liked you for your intellect not your designer purse, and maybe even voted Democrat every once in a while (a stretch, I know). To some extent, Yale met my expectations. But as time wore on, I began to pick up on a different type of elitism...intellectual elitism. "You didn't learn Calculus when you were five?" "Your most exciting guest speaker was Bruce Pearl, and you didn't even have a speaker at graduation who wasn't a member of the student body? ""You pronounce Kant like can't? Is that a joke?!" "What private school did you go to? Oh...well uh, where are you from? Oh. OH. Right. Well I know some really rich people in Nashville...you don't know them because you actually live in Bum Fuck Nowhere in the mountains? Oh. That's cool that your parents hike for a living, my obscenely successful parents would love to have free time to do recreational activities. Of course that would mean that I might even have to fill out one of those horrible forms...what are they called? FAFSAs? Ugh. Financial aid gives me hives."
I quickly retired my Dooney and Bourke and set about trying to learn about this disgustingly fascinating creature-the Privileged Legacy. You see, being of the upper crust isn't easy. You have to keep up with maintenance on all four of your homes (don't be ridiculous, Tara, we had to sell one because of this terrible recession...no not the one in Rome, the other one. No, not the beach house. The one in Palm Beach. Terrible ordeal.), you have to send your children to the best schools $40,000 a year can buy, and push them to be at least 10 times more successful than you were at their age. "You don't have a BlackBerry? Why not? Why don't you need it...haven't you founded your own non-profit yet?" It's an interesting breed, the P.L. They're not just extraordinarily well off, they're also incredibly intelligent, so their massive intellects combined with immaculate breeding (fluency in Latin by sophomore year in high school, working knowledge of all levels of classic lit from every major time period, and a couple of really nice suits), they are power houses of superiority. I remember talking to a classmate last year, trying to hard to understand how he could truly believe he was the most intelligent person he knew. Another incident ended in my finding out he had stocked his iPod with a lot of really cool, diverse music solely for show, so that when someone scrolled though his music they'd think he was a fun and musically worldly human being. Who are these people?!
After beating my head against a wall for being the dumbest hick at Yale, someone who mispronounces names of famous authors because she's only ever seen them in writing, can't name all the members of the House by looking at them, and doesn't remember logarithms because, well, she didn't actually learn about them in school, I finally got it. I started seeing the cracks in the porcelain faces of these people I envied so much, starting with their families. The relationship a P.L. has with his/her family is often a functional one, but (sadly) rarely more than that. Parents serve to pay your way through life until you get a job of your own, a favor you repay by becoming them when you grow up, starting with getting in to an Ivy, of course. Preferably their alma mater. I have heard countless classmates talk about their future careers, only to find out that they'd picked them based solely on their average incomes. The next generation of 15 hour a day work fiends sits next to me in lecture, takes on 50 extracurriculars as resume padders, and drinks until he passes out, unaware for a few hours of the pressure squeezing every last drop of dignity and creativity from his system until he's ready to be a man.
There are some P.L.s who aspire to be politicians. They live in a fantasy world filled with intellectuals of the same caliber, so they never really have to interact with the real world, a skill I'm going to go out on a limb and say might be essential for enacting real political change. The political organization meetings they go to consist of a bunch of really smart and well informed kids sitting around debating situations they cannot possibly fathom because they aren't part of the scenery outside their Range Rover's window. Every once in awhile they'll go outside and spend an hour at a soup kitchen, or give change to the Flower Lady, and for them that's enough.
It takes a special kind of person to think being at Yale is no big deal-someone who's spoiled. Certainly, someone who has vast expectations placed on his shoulders, a head full of memorized facts and countless pages of nicely written fiction, and a working understanding of economics, but a child all the same. Someone who has never had to choose between field trips and new clothes, who has never used a food stamp, and who has never heard the words "We're going to have a meager Christmas this year, sweetie." Someone who has never had to make their own way in the world without the family name getting a well manicured foot in the door, who has never participated in a cause because it was something they really believed in, not because they stood to gain anything but personal fulfillment. A baby, who stands alone at parties filled with strangers because Daddy's money won't help him here, who sits silently when good music is discussed because he hasn't memorized what to say in this situation, and dares utter the words, "Yale isn't really a big deal...it's just kind of expected" without realizing how ignorant he really is about the world around him, and how damn close he was to being born into a trailer trash family in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains.
I'm definitely not saying that everyone at Yale is like this. There are a lot of kids here who work incredibly hard for what they've got, and I admire them completely. There are also a lot of kids who are legacies, or very affluent, or both, who are fantastically down to earth and fun to be around. However, the spoiled Privileged Legacy is certainly a prevalent character on the Yale scene, and was a huge part of my decision to let go of my doctor/lawyer dream and major in something that will barely keep bread on the table, but will make me happy and fulfilled as an influential citizen of the world. I would never want to do my children the disservice that my classmates' parents have done them-so much fantastic education, no real world in which to apply it. A life of love and satisfaction trumps one of nice cars and crisp suits any day of the week.
T.
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