how often do you interact with people from other class backgrounds

this is evidently not anything terribly new but a lot of english people seemingly have very little no non-phatic contact with people in other social classes, even though they will probably be well acquainted with people from many other cultural backgrounds. perhaps it's this increasing heterogeneity and 'tolerance' in other respects that makes this country's time honoured social stratiation seem more acute.

this probably resembles some owen jones comment is free post about social apartheid but anyway, i wonder how people elsewhere experience this.

I'm American so we're all middle class

this was by one recent example given by a not particularly close friend of mine who still lives at home smoking weed and being generally useless having quit his phd. his family has been having some unneccessary garden surgery done at their exurban pile and he was talking to one of the landscapers. this middle aged labourer has some work-induced condition and is on painkillers whose efficacy is fading. he still works fulltime in gardens and in a cemetery digging graves and is terrified of losing employment because the welfare system tries (or is forced) to fuck people over more and more

so this episode had fully engaged my feckless friend's liberal guilt complex about depending on blood relative welfare and i was sort of chiding him about his naivete when confronted with the indignity that our political settlement causes. its not like i am particularly acquainted with this sort of situation either but maybe general pessimism or realism helps. i remember as a child asking why the poor people dont kill the rich people and steal their things. anyway he couldnt believe that there were still people in this state of immiseration and precarity. its not like he is a rothschild or anything but his background (nonselective state school, 'good area' variety, private sixth form, six or seven years in universities) had entirely inoculated him against the reality of life for a substantial number of people in a country where social protection is being dismantled. he couldnt think of any working class people with whom he had had any meaningful contact since school. this is probably not untypical.

I ride the bus every day

i grew up comfortably middle class in a bedroom-community-ish part of agricultural america and mixed regularly with somewhat more rural but certainly not poor hunter and farmer types up til college, and spent the years thereafter up through a phd in various states of tolerable studenty poverty/skintness, pretty well ensconced in a version of comfort. but i've since also spent around three disjointed years completely unemployed and underemployed and variously paid when working, and i've come to the point where i'm barely making do with a grind of a job at which i would literally have to work all-out for more than full-time hours (which i can't throw myself into doing, yet) to bring in enough money not to be perpetually almost broke. despite thanks obama my insurance is still messed up / nonexistent and i do need some work done pretty seriously. i've more or less stopped buying anything but food and paying bills, and like never before i'm becoming acutely aware of how much things cost, taking a pass on coffee when it's not at sale at the store, feeling irked when i drop a few grains of rice down the drain by accident because I PAID FOR THAT AND I COULD HAVE EATEN IT, calculating when i can do without replacing necessities or not paying bills for a few more days, that kind of economizing out of absolute, fear-of-eviction necessity rather than virtue. when i was really hard pressed a couple months ago a college friend sent me a big check out of the blue to help me cover groceries. at the same time, more or less my whole family is now working fairly shitty manager-level service jobs so whatever ability to lend a hand or sympathy for hardship they had before has been steadily on the decline since their own lives were fucked over by the vicissitudes of the global financial whatsit.

i say all that just to say, since the world of my facebook friends and intermittent real contacts is still more or less populated by academics and college nerd friends, the worse my circumstances have become, the more incomprehensible and infuriating their lives have gotten to me. their feckless shows of concern, their narcissistic leisure time activities, their blase expenditures on toys and travel and restaurant meals and houses, their stupid petty life enrichment pastimes, their 'community involvement'. and above all just the growing sense of distance. like, i understand why, but when we share less of the same living conditions, it starts to seem like there can be less understanding between us. even with people with whom i otherwise retain more or less all of my class identifications but the economic/career ones.

all of which is pretty narcissistic of me anyway, because i'm sure it hasn't been easy for all of them, and i know my life is in certain ways a lot less miserable than it could be, and is for others. but it has made me more pessimistic about cross-class interaction.

i taught at an inner-city (that's misleading but apt enough) community college once and i had more interaction with extra-class people (mainly students, but also not) then than i had in any other setting for years. students who had been in jail, students who had to drop because they had violated parole, students with behavioral problems, homeless students, plus all kinds of less exceptional (for those reasons) students, bad in school, troubled home lives, working three jobs, working mothers, the rest. since it was still school, after all, in many ways they were more or less like all the students i've ever taught. but occasionally some differences would come out in things where, in my role as a teacher, i could customarily just assert impersonal authority and expect that something be done, and if it doesn't get done, then aside from really exceptional circumstances, one just looks at the student who didn't do it and says, well, you should have done that, why didn't you? i'm sorry it can't be helped any more. but with some of my community college students, it seemed faintly more absurd to wield that authority, in that way, as if the circumstances of their lives were irrelevant. of course, they generally wanted to succeed on academic terms and move on to the next thing, for whatever reasons, usually work- and career-related, so they didn't want their circumstances to hinder them any more than i did, or any more than one is supposed to recognize them to. but some of the things that were going on in their lives, atypical for upper middle class students and more typical for lower class life, were just, like, things NOTHING COULD BE DONE about, given their circumstances, their means, given the way that assistance to others is dispensed and distributed in the world. but they were things that kept them from being able to do things that more comfortable people just expect are doable, so that the range of exceptions meriting their concern or involvement is narrowed.

I would say very little, since I work from home and don't get out much. My wife would probably say "constantly" since she grew up really, really poor and has had a class-based chip on her shoulder all her life, and thinks I grew up rich. (Something we don't agree on.)

I think about this a fair amount.

i rarely interact with other people from the same class background. bit odd.

the english countryside is always a pleasant experience because people of different classes interact routinely there. as far as i can tell they all want to kill each other. the countryside makes me think of dostoevsky's fathers being supposedly being killed by his serfs.

oh btw for all the i-am-a-man-of-the-ppl-ness of pointing to public transpo as a form of extra-class interaction, i do think it is one. i rode the city bus more or less everywhere for about ten years, and i would routinely observe students new to town, people taking the occasional trip to the mall or a sporting event, etc., riding and feeling conspicuously uncomfortable around non-white riders and public behavior not circumscribed by middle class norms. we recently added a rail line to replace a city transport artery bus line, and with the slightly different conditions suddenly there's all kinds of enthusiasm for taking public transit, as if it's not nearly the same as riding the bus down that line had been for decades. finally, it's pleasant and comfortable etc. there's an 'if it can't be helped' element to riding the bus that dovetails nicely with its exposure to other things that can't be helped (delays, sharing seats, being accosted by homeless riders, etc.) and that is the opposite of the luxury of transporting oneself around in one's car whenever one wants.

most of the people i interact with regularly are from different class backgrounds than me but this wasn't always the case

i engage in shallow, meaningless discourse with people from all walks of life

can't be having with the poor at all at all

i feel estranged from the sort of people i grew up with and am related to but have matured enough to realize i've never been 'really' poor and dont really know anyone that is except vaguely

anyway i dont really know how to answer this w/o beginning to parse the various degrees of upper and upper-middle class that exist in america but dont articulate themselves very often

Used to be a fair amount, building things for rich people and working with recent immigrants.
Now, there's some range between working class and the top end of middle, but few extremes. My friend is dating a guy whose parents are crazy rich, talking to him was like talking to an alien.

His best friend is really into adventure hunting films, so he went on a South African safari and hired a film crew to follow him around to make a short. That seemed completely normal to the guy.

there's a vast difference between "interacting with" as a matter of necessity or course (say, through work, school, out-and-about-ness) and actively choosing to socialize with, welcoming into one's come-over-for-dinner circle. i'm middle class. upper middle to full-on upper in terms of my family's cultural background, but somewhat alienated from the rarefied reaches, by both choice and circumstance. my friends have tended not to come from blue-blooded stock, but from the great gray middle. the casually privileged. liberals, readers, artists and bohemians, only children and youngest siblings. a narrowly-defined group, though i don't consciously seek that out.

day to day, though, i interact with everybody.

A lot hinges, as always, on the definition of classes, i suppose. I grew up culturally middle-class but economically poor and it's definitely the former that dominates now. I'd guess that 90% of the people i work with went to university and it's probably close to 100% for the people i socialise with, though i'd assume that a proportion of both would still self-define as "working class". The creep of university-educated people into service roles probably means that my phatic contact with people from other backgrounds is more limited now as well.

I rarely interact with people.

every fucking time i go to work

the vast majority of my friends/social circle are working class, i do still feel instinctively more comfortable in that company but i have to point out that there are an infinite number of complexities and caveats there

How often do I interact with people who come from a different class background to me? Every day.

How often do I interact with people who currently exist outside of the nebulous group of retail/service/student/teacher/office/arts/[insert job that is kind of badly paid but traditionally middle class here]? Eh, never, really. But I'm not sure that all those things really are the same class, or are the same experience for people who come from different classes.

most people who self-identify as middle class today are proles in a Marxist sense anyway

afaik virtually none of my friends or colleagues have any meaningful idea of my class background or upbringing, which I take a possibly irrational comfort in

in answer to the actual question the first sentence of Lamp's post more or less covers it for me also, maybe excepting a few ppl who work in bars/kitchens and are locked into that for better or worse

afaict to the extent that ppl in the country do want to kill each other, it isn't necessarily along class lines

I slip into a rural drawl and pepper my convo with y'alls and yups.

Oh wait, I misread the thread title as "how do you interact with people from other class backgrounds"?

also, guy fawkes isn't french

^gets it.

This thread makes me think of the times I've employed the services of a chimney sweep. He was way more middle-class than me though, honest

(Real answer: what class I think I am depends on where I am. At work I feel distinctly common but in prev jobs I felt like a snob)

I'm American so we're all middle class

― heck (silby), Tuesday, August 19, 2014 9:56 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Use other more accurate facts.

I currently work in downtown Washington, DC, and ride a bus to get to there, so I routinely come into contact with all classes except the true 1% (which I define for the purposes of this discussion as people who drive to work without having the reason of needing to pick up their children before their daycare providers close).

For what it's worth (considerably less than what you paid to read this), I am mindful that I have made some "good choices" (good = reflecting 21st-century capitalist values) regarding my life. I am also mindful that many other people do not have the options that would make it easier to make those choices.

this was always a weird situation for me. i grew up interacting with people ranging from future criminals to the last living heiress of an old New England dynasty. so from the bottom all the way to the top. i never really belonged to any of it, though, but since i was exposed to a lot of different classes i can move through different circles pretty easily. but it can only ever go so far since i was always sort-of an outsider. i can blue collar it up until they think i'm a prep school snob, and i can blue blood it until they think i'm poor. it's not always easy finding people who come from mixed backgrounds like that, and it caused no end of misery growing up, so i've just accepted my dodgy outsider status.

http://i.imgur.com/dTogrQq.jpg

Hello! I'm Carla, a dachshund/pug cross or a daug. I don't like the word 'daug', and much prefer 'dachspug', though. Pleased to meet you. *shakes paw*

I live in a really big house full of people. Some of them sit at tables and talk loudly into telephones, or sometimes go down the hill to the beach, or go on a boat. Others bring plates and food to the ones who sit at tables. I belong to one of these people! But it's ok because everyone loves me and wants to be my friend, especially the young ones.

http://i.imgur.com/X4BZqBV.jpg

I think it's fair to say that I see people from all sorts of backgrounds. I mean, the people I belong to were brought up in small houses and didn't have much money, but you should see how they live now! They have to work very hard and do everything they're told, but they don't complain, or at least, I don't hear them complain much.

Anyway, today a funny thing happened. Two young adult people turned up, to work with the young ones! Apparently they came yesterday and the day before too, but I hadn't seen them yet. They spoke confidently and displayed the mannerisms of the richer people, but they were here to serve them. All very strange.

Here I am with one of them:

http://i.imgur.com/6XQoLR1.jpg

…and here I am with the other:

http://i.imgur.com/u8xjesJ.jpg

Later, of course, the two of them went and sat in the eating space, where they served themselves food. Served themselves food! Nobody does that in this house! Even I am served. Although not by them, try as I might (I have a very winning charm!)

http://i.imgur.com/Y9kSO3K.jpg

Trusting these new people was difficult at first. I've not always had it easy with people. Some of them have hit me in the past. I'm wary with meeting strangers. When they first turned up, I approached them to be petted, but submissively, fearing a wrath which never came.

http://i.imgur.com/El2YPFw.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/3nNTVEj.jpg

My life is mostly good, though. I can play with whomever I want, and nobody gets too angry at me any more. And what's more, I don't care what background these people have! In the sunlight of Sardinia, nobody is truly unhappy.

http://i.imgur.com/pLdI8Dm.jpg

http://31.media.tumblr.com/38cc2407d2ff51dbe34e83b92a4de414/tumblr_n1vgm6vArq1skygwqo1_400.gif

http://i.imgur.com/NBtzmv5.png

I grew up in a poor-ish Southeast Asian immigrant neighborhood, bordered by a neighborhood of old white Irish Catholics who hadn't succumbed to white flight yet

Economically, probably lower-middle class

Formative school experiences were at a magnet, so was exposed to a wide range of classes, ended up hanging out with what I'd guess you'd call working-class kids

Attending an Ivy was a real shock, basically the opposite of the experience described above

Now on a trajectory where it'll basically be upper crusters from here on out

Still not entirely comfortable, like what You Care About is not what I Care About

People talk about planning and going on vacations and "investing"

IDK I just wanna stay home and read books and watch movies

you could chill with a random person drawn from the social stratus every ten mins for a week and What You Care About might never hit their gong, ime

^^^ a lot like my story, except I like vacations

(and I'm Latino rather than Asian)

(did I just racist-y zing myself?)

er xp

Yeah for sure - but IDK the disconnect seems to be on a deeper level

Like a person will be like "this [x] event involved the lacrosse team at my high school"

And I'd have been like, shit what's lacrosse

Obv now I know all about siiiiiiiiiick laaaaaaaaaaax

xp to darragh

its weird to me that someone would think of vacations or investments as particularly estranging

smh at ppl who haven't read about Mallory towers, that's the real disconnect here

Magic Faraway Tree was the only Blyton i fucked with tbh

yeah well, sure, if you had to pick only one......

'The Land of Do-As-You-Please' is basically a middle class nightmare abt unruly proles

Chalet School = upper middle class

vacations were few and far between when I was a kid, and 99% of the time it meant driving to a neighboring state and seeing a few attractions over part of a week then driving home

so yeah, the idea of multiple-per-year vacations or actually traveling long distance was pretty foreign to me as a kid. and I really doubt 90% of the people I went to, say, high school with, ever are able to consider investments.

Xp The vacations thing might just be a familial quirk

Like looking back we took a few trips to China but those were more familial obligation, visiting family

Other than those there was a trip to Niagara Falls when I was like 4

And we went on a cruise to celebrate college graduation

Between those two trips I can't recall a single other family vacation

Investing is like, idk, I'm basically just learning now that it's a good idea to do something with your money so that you 'beat' inflation

And that letting your money sit in a bank account (or a safe deposit box which my parents used to do) is bad

Imma learn it tho and get sick ROI

Watch and see

the wedding I attended last weekend definitely had a split in class, although not as evident as it could have been. the groom's father has worked in manufacturing (factory floor, union job, still reasonable wages and benefits) his whole life and I think the majority of the bride's immediate family has a master's degree or are doctors.

the groom's family were talking about the other side of their family having a wedding where people wore jeans and their nicest harley davidson t-shirts

chinese symbol, i felt some of that pressure when i was in law school. it's keeping up with the joneses. you can notice people who work really hard to cobble together a respectable upper middle class life when you're in the professional field. pressure to buy finer foods, have finer things, take vacations that sound good to talk about, have the right hobbies and interests, etc. i also witnessed the death of the upper middle class side of my family, who built up all that stuff a few generations ago, so i've also seen how stupid and pointless it all is. i'm with you on just trying to enjoy life on your own terms. but i've got a pretty apocalyptic mindset, so ymmv.

Glad that you understand me, http://i.imgur.com/yJ0EzoB.gif

wow, i definitely made a mistake here, i had no idea this guy was so loved on here. lesson learned i guess.

nakh is more feared than loved, you did the right thing spectrum

archimedes only copped to the displacement of fluid after farting in latin in the bath

― duff paddy (darraghmac), Thursday, August 21, 2014 11:24 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

eu-reek-a ok done

xp that's exactly what drew me to this situation. but mob rules i suppose.

message boards make strange bedfellows

rich and middle class types alike learning chinese

the uk right is hugely into pacific rim vibrant dynamic enterprise capitalism and 'asian values' as lee kuan yew has it

contra 'sclerosis' of europe

theres a book some wasteman at the economist micklethwaite or something wrote recently which harked on this theme

*farts*

i've not noticed clients of mine learning chinese. but then they're largely russian or arabic, so have no need for yet another language bloc

chinese was pretty popular at my fancy, private, east coast high school

i took spanish

why u choose spanish treesh?

its a damn sight easier to learn the chinese which would be reason enough i suppose

lj the first bit of that about workmen in yr house was going back to nakh's anecdote way upthread, an illustration of the peculiarities of class guilt that is unrelated to yr sardinian sojourn unless you also suffer from it. if yr using solidarity to just mean being open to/interested in ppl then none of this is really relevant

xp yeah, there was that and i had already taken it in middle school. i was never very good at spanish because i wasn't a diligent student but i did believe back then, and still do, that all americans should learn spanish.

solidarity is probably a spectrum (but not - aha - a Spectrum)? it demands unpacking at least, yeah - the extent to which is is attempted, achievable, etc

idk if lj would be nearly so surprised to be confronted with how harsh life can be in the uk in 2014

yh i do live on the edge of one of the biggest council estates in s london tbf

f/more i've experienced localised poverty - walking across london due to having no oyster cash, pawning £15 gold necklace for pregnancy test etc

My upper-mid/upper best friend in DC has her daughters doing Mandarin, possibly also Japanese - as well as Spanish and French. Although her dad was from the British upper middle/Oxbridge class, she lived in the shittiest part of South Minneapolis and wore Goodwill clothes until she was about 12, so much of this is about giving her kids the stuff she, in hindsight, wishes her parents would have given her instead of the huge 'great man with PRINCIPLES' drama she actually lived through. OTOH, she's glad her parents were not materialistic in any way and is trying to keep that going for her girls in the midst of a conspicuously consuming DC suburb.

BTW there are important non-arts reasons to study Greek and Latin at school (I didn't because my school didn't offer it) and they are all to do with taking up sciences and/or medicine (as BFF's ancient mad-scientist dad was fond of telling us).

the regional rich in utah, us have to contend with being rich, mormon, and somewhere always shifting along the rancher/cowboy divide. i imagine it's very difficult. there are only like 3 truly rich people in the state. chinese and arabic would be impressive languages to acquire due to mba culture, but other than that internationalism seems limited to resort vacations in mexico, or thailand if you're thinking of the more liberal monieds with camps in park city who tend to be l.a. cast-offs in love with their ski town white playground retreatedness. run-off from p.c. is where slc gets its favored leisure arts, soft-media and fashionable bourgeoisie real estate culture, though there are hipsters here along the portland-nyc axis, still with capital obv. there is a more anarchic-seeming tradition of expressive history tied to the mining towns and the railroad. not to romanticize our lower classes too much, they're generally as conservative and closed-minded as anyone and beset by the demands of service industry / telemarketing exploitation and general dislocation, alienation, cultural problems of poverty, in which an appealingly symbolic way forward which is favored by nearly everyone here is to start producing offspring. it's pretty close to home as i mentioned upthread, it's my striver father's background. doctors tend to be well-represented among the rich in this place, thanks to a huge and kafkaesque medical-industrial complex managing life and drugs for the repressed and insane populace.

^awesome post

oh i guess there is now tech money here too, thank god xp

It's true that American Sports Teams are a way for Americans of different classes to relate to each other

We can all agree that the Phillies stink, for example

☑

rich and middle class types alike learning chinese

the uk right is hugely into pacific rim vibrant dynamic enterprise capitalism and 'asian values' as lee kuan yew has it

contra 'sclerosis' of europe

theres a book some wasteman at the economist micklethwaite or something wrote recently which harked on this theme

― tao lin comment boxing (nakhchivan), Thursday, August 21, 2014 1:29 PM (34 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this whole affinity is super fascinating to me. all the trv kvlt weirdo hard right types are fretting about how these capital enclaves have sub-sub-sub-replacement birthrates

anyway my answer to this is not often

service industry / telemarketing

what my enormous mass of posts above was trying to do was tease apart the differences within this axis, but in your post it works as an immanent whole - teasing apart the cultural cachets instead is maybe a better way to go

not that they're mutually exclusive (profession/culture)

Asian capital also seen to be too focused on primogeniture and consolidating conglomerates to be truly dynamic in some quarters. Xps

there was an executive of the corporation I work for who, having been in charge when the company was sold (and had already been taking a salary according to this speculation), had excessive signs of wealth. a large house in the older, more regal part of town dating back to the early 1900s that had been fully remodeled, including the expansive guest house. a fine porsche, custom upholstered in a style designed by his wife. the company, for a brief period under his reign, had a showcase office in a downtown building, occupying two stories with a spiral marble staircase connecting the two and a large wood-paneled and -tabled conference room.

such opulence was entertaining but after he took his leave, his home was incredibly difficult to sell, and the flagship office location removed, as it made no sense (especially given the humble beginnings of the company and its customers). such things have no place in some cities and industries.

sports sort of drifts away from baseball in some red state hinterlands imo, but yes, generally it is our great unifier xps

Think the stingy billionaire trope above is interesting- but rather than say, stingy, I'd say habitual

Warren Buffet eating for lunch every single day a hamburger with vanilla milkshake, Ikea's CEO habit of flying coach and driving a Volvo from 1993, Li Ka Shing's $150 Seiko watch

As if the drive to make money were some sick affliction that they could strive towards curing through expression in excess but the bough of the fruit tree always recedes

Book came out last year about the new Asian superrich, purportedly based on the author's lived experience

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/01/books/kevin-kwans-crazy-rich-asians-depicts-a-cult-of-opulence.html?_r=0

what my enormous mass of posts above was trying to do was tease apart the differences within this axis, but in your post it works as an immanent whole - teasing apart the cultural cachets instead is maybe a better way to go

― imago, Thursday, August 21, 2014 1:20 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think there are differences but tbh i'm not close enough to see them. suspect there's just kind of an interplay though. and obviously we have a sea between us but these service industry exploitation centers probably all look very similar when it comes down to it, including the various means employed to stick people in them. i mean i've had some of these jobs but disassociated myself because i never wanted to like anyone there, kids from layton with contractor dads, etc. now i just want to see and relate, separate the people from the market from a nomadic pov.

:)

xp to 龜 i think in america it's a badge related to puritanism one can display to make oneself more socially real. ironically symbols of prudence or practicality are usually employed by richer whiter people while lower-class people who are making money, that is not necessarily a built-in instinct, which could be one reason among many why their wealth tends not to last.

i'm going to remedy any interclass shortcomings i have by sinking into late-life poverty

when the truly finer things like film baseball beer and boys are all somewhat available maybe it's not such a bad tradeoff.

Asian capital also seen to be too focused on primogeniture and consolidating conglomerates to be truly dynamic in some quarters. Xps

― Wristy Hurlington (ShariVari), Thursday, 21 August 2014 20:23 (Yesterday)

the reality and consensuality and embdeddedness in earlier social forms of capitalism in most of those countries is less important to 2010 entry conservative mps of the very lowest intellectual order is less important than the sense of relentless growth -- if china can grow at 9% p/a, why can't established wealthy nations? -- given by photographs of skyscrapers and FT reports of gucci opening new shops in chengdu or whatever, and the fact that they mostly have less social protection than europe

got through the first few pages of that economist shitheads book and it was mostly just like inane time articles from 1950 talking about incipient soviet technocratic ascendancy or 1980s time articles talking about the imminent rise of japan to be the #1 economy of the world, alongwith a sort of inverted 'yellow peril' racism in the guise of infatuation

1 x is less important than

this whole affinity is super fascinating to me. all the trv kvlt weirdo hard right types are fretting about how these capital enclaves have sub-sub-sub-replacement birthrates

anyway my answer to this is not often

― goole, Thursday, 21 August 2014 20:20 (Yesterday)

the recurrent assertion that northeast asians are the only ally of the white race in the eternal struggle against domination by lesser races in the work of those truly deranged post-humanist philosophers and cranks like john derbyshire is never less than fascinating and awful

feel like goole is the only person on ilx who i can relate to in spending time reading about the very worst shit on the internet be it on t4k1m4g.com or on sites other than t4k1m4g.com

oh dude, thats...

...

flattering, really.

i wonder (not really) why my penchant for extremity comes out in politics websurfing rather than, idk, music or other personal habits. something to be thankful for probably.

anyway, yeah, the inverted use of Leonard Jeffries' typologies, guaranteed lols

lj do u have any updates re carla

had the chance to keep teaching that family but turned it down to preserve my weekends

maybe worth just a quick email to see if she is ok? or just a trinket or two off her amazon wishlist, should she have been allotted one

I think I'm kind of lucky I attended a middle school with busing from poor parts of town, a magnet school with people from every walk of life, and a public college. I grew up somewhere middle to upper middle class -- professional dad, mom who didn't work for years, 3BR house in a good school district, two non-fancy cars, regular vacations, lots of *cultural capital* (exposure to classical music, museums, literature, etc.). I notice that today I tend to naturally chat with people at every level of office staff much more than I see other people in my field do (it tends to be stratified), and this is in spite of me being a slightly awkward person. Not saying it makes me any great humanitarian, but I feel able to talk with and relate to most kinds of people.

I'd probably compare myself class-wise to a college professor's kid -- comfortable, but greater "wealth" in terms of access and culture than in actual money.

i always thought i was ok with this but i find it pretty difficult to talk to my french canadian girlfriend's hick ass family

could just be a cultural thing

is there a language barrier?

french is my second language and i'm kinda rusty yeah

rural quebec is definitely a thing, I have had limited interactions but it's a pretty wild time out there in the boondocks

do Canadian hicks drive trucks around and wave the French flag?