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10:24pm June 6, 2012

➸ "You don't need this junk. You need a cat.": And all the categories get shifted around again...

feliscorvus:

youneedacat:

Pretty often I’m in a situation where I feel like things are one way, but end up talking about them another way. Because I’m so sure that they couldn’t possibly be what they seem to be. And in this case, because I’m afraid of being taken the wrong way. And then someone comes along and tells me…

Class stuff (as in, socioeconomic class) has always been really confusing to me. I grew up in Connecticut (well, at least until my late teens, after my parents got divorced, my mom moved to the UK, and I moved out to California with my dad and siblings). And when I was little I got harassed a LOT by classmates for looking/seeming “poor”. 

Mind you, we didn’t live in Greenwich or any of the other uber-affluent cities in CT; we lived in West Haven for a while and Milford for the rest of the time before moving across the country. And I actually still have no idea how our family income compared to that of the classmates who made fun of my clothes, my parents’ vehicles, etc. I do know that my dad hadn’t finished college when I was born. He went to night school and got his associate’s degree, then a bachelor’s degree a few years later, when I was old enough to remember his graduation. 

But I do know that the whole way we lived and dealt with money was very, very different from the default in our hometown(s). I was the eldest kid in the family but I nonetheless wore a lot of hand-me-downs from family friends, and my “brand new” clothes tended to be from discount stores. My parents drove used cars of varying vintage. We never went on expensive vacations (that is, nothing that required an airplane trip; I remember peers expressing bafflement at the fact that I’d never been to Disney World), but rather, on camping trips (where we slept in tents and cooked our food over a fire, etc. — I should note that I LOVED camping as a kid and would have lived in a tent if I’d been allowed). 

Oh and another thing. This I actually only came to realize as an adult, and fairly recently at that. Very little other than actual garbage was ever thrown out when I was a kid. I don’t mean this in a “compulsive hoarding” sense, I mean it in the sense that if things broke, it was just understood that you do your best to fix it rather than rush out and replace it. And along with this my dad always emphasized how important it was to take care of the things you had. 

The net effect of this was that I ended up absorbing these near-archetypial ideas of what certain objects felt and looked like and had difficulty even fathoming a potential replacement even being “real”. And I’m talking random basic household items here, like hose nozzles and cookie tins and bath towels and hairbrushes, not sentimental objects like stuffed animals. It still strikes me as a little odd how often most people (at least, most people who would be grouped as “middle class” or higher) replace things like this. I mean even a threadbare bath towel with a pulled-out seam will get you dry, so why get a new one, even if it’s “only” $10? 

So yeah, need to go work on some other things now but wanted to write that down while I was thinking of it. Not sure how it exactly relates to the post I’m reblogging but it’s what came to mind when I read it.

Yeah it confuses the hell out of me too.

Especially since like… we lived in a big house starting when I was five or six. As in bedrooms for all of us and one spare bedroom, split level, nice yard. Of course, we did get it cheaper because the support structures were rotting and it took ages to get rid of the marijuana stench from previous owners in my parents’ room, and it was dark and murky, and seriously unpleasant to live in if, like me, you were bad at pretending. (Since we moved out, nobody has wanted to stay more than a year.) But still it was big. And I went to private school for four years, with kids whose parents were doctors, lawyers, and CEOs. Although we had to take out loans and crap and other parents didn’t. There were a few kids there who weren’t what I’d have called rich at the time, but not many. And we sometimes got something expensive. And we got my clothes at department stores sometimes. (But thrift stores other times. And never name brands.)

But my friend says that’s because some people at the top end of the working class have income overlapping the middle or sometimes even low-upper end of the middle class. I guess that makes sense. Confusing as hell though.

Other than that though a lot of things were like you describe. I didn’t even know how different some things were from what “normal” kids had at the time. We used records and black and white TV well into the eighties. We had much poorer relatives who had things like that long before we did. I didn’t even know any kind of lawn mower existed in the eighties besides the kind we had – a handle, two wheels, and a spinning blade. We used a wood stove and wood from the huge amount of trees we had to chop down (because of dying or being planted in dangerous locations) to heat the house. We never had a lawn in the first place unless one just happened to grow. And we tended to fix stuff and reuse it unless my mom got into one of her dangerous spending moods with the credit cards. I don’t know how much of all that was because we needed to and how much was just habit, but I’m guessing at least some of it was to offset the areas where we did spend money.

It’s all very confusing to me though. Like I used to think class was just about money, but my friend is saying that’s only one piece of it. But apparently the fact that my parents rapidly became very poor upon retiring says a lot. As does the kinds of jobs they had and the power structures involved.