Filthy Rich

Someone posted a list of things "poor kids" know, which uses vague language to describe to rich people what it's like to be a poor kid.  Reading it, if things didn't apply to me, they applied to a friend.

I grew up poor.  Not deprived- we had enough.  We didn't have cable or a dryer or an answering machine or insulation or air conditioning or multiple cars.  Some of those things came later, others, my parents still don't have.

But that's why I never thought we were poor.  Poor people didn't have phones or cars or soap.  But I was the kid filling out paperwork to qualify for scholarships to the gifted classes we couldn't afford, the kid who can recognise the difference between a gun shot and a car backfiring and doesn't worry about either, the kid who grew up astonished at the "mansions" her middle school friends lived in.

I've spent my entire life believing that "middle class" is rich, because I assumed that, not living like a character in a Dickens novel, that qualified as middle class.

I suddenly don't give a shit about the financial problems of the "middle class."  You're busy living lives of comparative luxury, you can afford much more than you think you can.  A woman I consider wealthy, married to a local celebrity, was in a rehearsal with me where she brought in a glass vase I knew to be a gift from the local PBS drives.  Someone admired it and she had an, "Oh, this old thing," and I (because I occasionally have no tact) said, "Isn't that a [pledge drive vase]?  Those are expensive." "Oh, not really, no."  "They're the $500 donation level."  "If you spread it over a year, it's a couple dollars a day.  It's less than we spend on coffee every morning, and it's a donation."

She later bemoaned the price of a college education and how hard it was for middle class families to send their children.

I don't bear her any ill will.  I'm just astonished that anyone who owns a remote start convertible with heated seats and spends more than 3 dollars a day for coffee can't figure out what to do to pay for a college education.  Like, maybe, reconsider your priorities as "college fund" not "luxuries."  Because they are.  But she doesn't know that because that's her life, any more than the super rich kids I knew had any idea what a broom was because their families had maid service.

I'm horrified to reconsider what rich is actually like when the kids I considered exceptionally wealthy now have to be viewed in the light of merely wealthy.

I Want Everything I've Ever Seen In the Movies

About six months ago, I applied for a position that I have eight years experience in with four different places.  It's a slightly different environment, and a supervisor position to what I've done, but I figured it'd be good to apply.  

Nothing.  

A month ago, they were hiring for the position I've done.  I was interviewed and they pretty much said, "we're impressed but no."  OK, sure, whatever.  I'm pretty sure the interviewers were the result of the supervisor search and that position's immediate supervisor.  

Three days ago, I see a posting for the same position I applied for six months ago and realise that the person I interviewed with had to have given her notice near the time I interviewed. I recognise there is no way I'd be hired for that position, but I really, really want to apply.  

I'm positive I don't really want to work there, though.  There's a lot of turnover and they seem incredibly unorganised.  This coming from the uncommunicative environment in which I currently work...  

It's raining and I'm feeling useless and unproductive.  I want to run away.  I saw a literary manager position for a theatre in New York that I'm interested in the other day and cried a little.  I couldn't get it, but even if I could, I don't have the freedom to do it even if I wanted to.  I'm tied here, without wanting to be.  

Some part of me wants to be here.  

The rest of me wants to run and keep running and stop being practical and sensible.  I want some closure in my life.  I'm going to have spent five years in this stupid limbo of trying to have what I can't and maybe don't even want.  

Bitternutt Lodge

It's fair to state that I don't have emotions like normal people.

Friend asked me today if it would be a good idea to warn a couple we know before seeing a movie that might screw with them emotionally due to some personal baggage they carry.  I said, more or less, "Maybe?  No.  Yes?  No.  You know, you should really ask your sister.  Or your wife.  I am like the least appropriate person to ask on this."

I hate the song Home, by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes.  I don't really hate it.  I love the song, it's fun, there’s whistling, it's got a catchy chorus that's east to sing, but I'm jealous of it.  It feels like nothing I've ever had.  Maybe like nothing I ever get to have.

It feels like the ache I used to get when I read Jane Eyre.  I stopped writing this to re-read bits of it, and discover that it works again.  The last time I read it, it was empty and shallow and I couldn't finish it because it felt false.

Obviously, I'm the change, but I don't know what it is.  Is it that I can believe in that kind of love again? “'My bride is here,' [...] 'because my equal is here, and my likeness."  How many times have I read that passage and never heard that line?  But tonight, that's the difference.  Jane gets a lot of criticism for not having a spine and letting Mr. Rochester own her, when she talks at length about how she refused to let him do that their entire engagement.

There’s the difference, they are equals mentally, but they can't be together because they're not spiritually compatible, and that’s why the last third of the book exists, to make both of them worthy of each other.

I guess that's what I've been missing.  Not in the book.

I was something of a mess last month.  I'm better now.  Or, at least, I'm not doing a lot of awful sobbing at the drop of a hat.  I realised last week that I was happy, for no particular reason, which was new.  So, I guess I'm through whatever that mess was.

I'm not used to having emotions.  Well, I am.  I'm used to repressing them.  My jaw has been clenched so hard it clicks when I open it.  I try to remind myself to relax, and then I start holding my breath.  It’s getting better, it’s not an exercise I hold at every traffic signal anymore.  Driving past the intersection to the grocery store, or wandering around it uncertain why I came in is still an occasional problem.

Nothing's changed, just me.

Warnings Fair

To the dude who is looking for his soul mate and true love with a profile containing only a photograph of himself (presumably, even weirder if it's some other guy) with a firm grip, through soccer shorts, on his junk.  Good luck to you.

A friend keeps appearing in my matches, ranked highly for nearly any combination of keywords.  He's a good friend, but, no.  Which tells me this process is not for me.  That I really am not interested enough in people to be involved with them.

I mentally reject anybody who mentions how important family is to them.  Nope.  I don't like my family, I don't like yours, I don't want those kind of complications.

I don't like people all that much.