(no subject)

[bubosquared]

Hate office politics. Feel like I should do something to get it through to M that half his staff is about to leave, and most of them haven't even been here for more than a year, and I like these people, dammit, I don't want to have to learn to know new ones!

Bitches.

Dude. Did not have to skip back at all this morning. Woa. Considering a time when I had to go back 300-400 entries each morning, ... Yeah.

I've been having that weird sense of displacement again lately. When I changed schools in the middle of high school, I went from a small-town school that was basically the dumping ground for all the kids who'd been thrown out of the "good" (Catholic) school, or who couldn't afford to go there, to a big school with mostly middle- and upper-middle class kids.

I grew up ... I want to say "poor", but it wasn't that, exactly. We never went without food, or clothes, or shelter, but I know that when my parents got married, they wcame back to an apartement so cold my mother burnt her wedding dress standing too close to the stove trying to get warm. I know that when I was a baby, they used to have me sleep between the two of them, because the blankets in my crib were frozen. I always used to wear hand-me-downs from family or friends. My parents could't have bought me whatever toy or clothing was trendy at any given time even if they'd wanted to.

I'm not bothered by all of that. Even when my parents did start having more money, I kept wearing hand-me-downs. They were cheap, looked nice, and they were delivered right to our living room, so that spared me the agony of having to go out and shop. It wasn't until I'd started earning my own money that I started having more new than second-hand clothes in my wardrobe. I never really cared for having the newest, shiniest, trendiest shoes; I was in love with my cowboy boots and I liked my shoes comfortable and sturdy, that's all I cared about.

We lived in social housing between my eight and fifteenth year, so most of the kids I played with were poorer than we were, and they came from all sorts of different social, cultural and family backgrounds. I didn't really think about it a lot until I changed schools.

It wasn't a constant thing, but every now and then, a subject would come up and someone would say something that made me realise almost all of them came from such different backgrounds than mine. It's hard to pinpoint exactly why or what, but the main things were a) they took a lot of material things -- new clothes, large (in my eyes) allowance, new school stuff every year, etc. -- for granted; and b) they grew up in a fairly homogenous environment -- most people they knew came from the same social and familial background, not a lot of immigrants, things like that.

I realise this makes my ex-classmates sound like spoiled brats and me like a streetwise working class kid. They weren't, and I wasn't, really. In a lot of ways, I was much more naive than they were. But during discussions about poverty or immigration or whatever, it often hit me that they were arguing from theory, whereas I was usually arguing from a theory based on my own experiences.

The whole thing never really bothered me a lot, but there was always that weird feeling that I didn't belong there, that on a very basic level, I couldn't communicate with them, because I couldn't explain why I felt certain things, why I belived what I did. I couldn't explain that despite the fact that I often took my political and social ideals too far to still be realistic, I did (and do) truly believe in them, because I knew poor people aren't poor because they're lazy, I knew immigrants aren't inherently more criminal than people who were born here, I knew where all that tax money was going.

And recently, I've been having that feeling again.

I should've been a social worker like my parents. Or a politician. ;p