Some Words on Failure

Right now I am reading Judith Halberstam's The Queer Art of Failure, after a long wait for it from the library. It is an okay read; I am skimming more than I should. I think this is a case where the underlying idea seems so inevitable that, once it has finally been expressed, the expression itself can come off as rather dull, almost trivial. (It may also be that Halberstam's writing moves with not much more grace than most academic prose, piquant subject matter aside.) But then I check this reaction a little, remembering that I am probably more disposed toward failure than most people, more likely to find it natural and self-evidently important.

By which I don't mean that it's more likely to be my destiny (though, sure, that too). But the art and the stories and the modes of life that keep my interest tend to come with some negativity built in. The records that buoyed me through the gray late winter were the Mountain Goats' Tallahassee and of Montreal's Paralytic Stalks, two narratives of flamboyant despair that anthemically proclaim "I hope you die, I hope we both die" and "I made the one I love start crying tonight / And it felt good." The kind of music I put on and thoughtlessly hum along to until whoever else is with me suddenly tunes in and stops and stares with concern. Until this point it has seemed that I am, if not nice, at least well-behaved and appropriately invested in maintaining a positive attitude. Now something has been called into question. 

I tend to forget that my particular brand of deep-seated skepticism is not necessarily the human condition. This startles me again and again. During college, noticing the mellowing of my personality and convictions, I began to assume that I would be pretty well aligned with the mainstream once I graduated from my mountain cloister and rejoined it. This assumption thudded to the beer-slicked sidewalk the first time I walked down Clark Street on the night of a Cubs game, having just arrived in Chicago. Taken a few at a time, they would have been a perfectly digestible part of the greater world I expected was somewhere outside my door, but the sheer numbers of these blonde and ball-capped persons having the time of their lives in a noisy hell forced me to revisit my status as the alienated weirdo I had always been.  

In the business of being an alienated weirdo, I have often come up against lives that are more strongly guided by the capitalistic imperative of growth and progress (if only implicitly; one senses that their owners half-observe its quiet motions as they do the streetlights turning on every evening, only ever registering that something must have happened). Reactions to these collisions have ranged from incomprehension to offense. There have been, of course, the teachers aggravated by the fact that the specter of bad grades could not convince me, young Bartleby, to do an assignment I found fundamentally flawed. The people, often for some reason in the self-evidently virtuous field of medicine, who are frankly annoyed by the apparent uselessness of my pursuits, which in addition to not making much money do not even seem fun.

Or there are the genially mystified ones like my father, upon whom, after a dozen conversations on the matter, I have still not been able to impress that my band is not nor is especially intended to be a moneymaking concern. Along the same lines, although I enjoy and am doing well at my current job, you couldn't especially count me among the ranks of those who "care about their careers." I live with an economic level of comfort that is probably par for the course of my age and level of education, but it still continually astonishes me. When someone asks whether I'm worried about losing my job I say no not because I don't believe it can't happen, but because there's some small muscle within me whose only purpose is to stay ready for resuming life as a waitress or temp and calculating the price of every bean-soup dinner.

I'm not entirely sure how I got this way. For a while as a kid it seemed I was supposed to be the successful one. There is this relevant thought, from an excellent essay by Alexandra Kimball: "Poverty doesn’t allow you to develop a linear career trajectory or a coherent professional identity, because when cash is hard to come by, you do whatever job will bring you more of it." Being an artsy kid in an economically unstable family, I got the worst of both worlds: none of the drive toward professional identity, and also none of the drive toward money. 

My mom has also located the focus of her life outside of her low-paying, dead-end job. I think she spins that as a sort of living-in-the-moment thing these days, and means it. But behind the spunky middle-aged optimism is the history of a woman who was first-chair violinist in her high school orchestra, who dreamed of being a veterinarian but had to leave college in her first semester due to depression and lack of money, who grew up with a mother who—as I learned only in the last five years, and second-hand—apparently thinks so little of women's capabilities that she believes they should not hold political office. (My grandmother, whom I love as much as I do anyone, surely soaked up this belief along with an upbringing's worth of other messages telling her that she was dumb and fat and unattractive and duty-bound to meet the whims of men; I can forgive her this, while also recognizing the subtle toxicity it must have introduced into her family.)

So there has been all that, and then also an early religious infatuation that presented being a nun or monk as an ideal way to live—another form of opting out of the drive to succeed. My brand of Christianity was never the delayed-gratification school of stockpiling one's treasure in heaven. There is a line in Simone Weil that I cannot now find, about gladly running to sit in the pit of hell for a thousand years if God ordered her to do so. I was no longer religious by the time I read that, but I immediately understood. Spiritual "success," if the term is meaningful, can surely not be so neatly allegorical; if this world truly does not matter, it cannot just be an off-brand version of the one to come. 

Philosophy and its extensions into anarchism probably took care of the rest by the time I was a teenager. Looking down into the roots of things is itself discouraged by the requirement to keep climbing and acquiring; it is so much time lost, and will not change anything except yourself once you come out the end of it. I always bristled when anyone characterized punk rock or anarchism as nihilistic — I aligned myself with these movements not because I hated the world as a whole, but because I dearly loved it and wanted to create structures that would let me spend more time there, appreciating things, rather than racing ahead somewhere profitable. (It is, of course, the voice of capitalism that insists that anarchism is nihilism, seeing no other alternative to itself but death.) Having examined the matter, I have determined that I am not here to make money or have babies to carry on the family name (or, probably, to carry out grand political projects either, as I eventually realized).

Not going in for an afterlife, I also know I have only a little time here or anywhere else. Weirdly, this results in laziness as much as it does activity. The inefficient machine of my creativity runs on vast quantities of indolence; I have just now been spurred toward the keyboard after several straight hours of reading while lying sprawled across the loveseat. I fail constantly at small talk and social life and family obligations, and happily, this leaves more time to lie around and read, walk around and look at things. There is, of course, one sense in which my ambition is foolishly, desperately huge, its goal to add beauty and resonance to the world through art. The thought of this success hangs always suspended before me, cushioned and protected by the pockets of failure I have positioned all around.

Borderlands: Lakeview/Ravenswood 1 - Moving In

Real summer air came down over the course of about a single afternoon and evening a few weeks ago, and now it's worked its way in. Humid and densely nourishing if a little over-rich, heavy with the scent of lilacs and lawnmower fumes. It's just past the time of year when I'd normally be staring down my collection of flattened boxes and refusing to clean or put anything away since I'll just have to clean it all and pack it all by the end of the month.

I'm staying put for once, not that I've been immune to the flirtations of the For Rent signs. But this weather makes me think of the real work of moving -- after the giddy thrill of selecting the new, empty apartment and before the comfort of having burrowed one's way into the neighborhood. The work of being unsettled, trying to build new patterns of living and hoping that they aren't the wrong ones.

I feel like I've written incessantly about my first few months in the city, but that isn't exactly true. It's mostly just that my antennae were turned up as high as they could go; I seemed to feel everything three or four times over. (And it's true that I did narrate much of it over the phone, long calls to California that were the sole venue for a relationship for a while.) Later I transferred much of the mood of that time into an ambitious work of fiction I'm not ready to say I'll never finish. But it's still not done with me. In beginning to write this here, I realize that it will be a multipart affair; a density of delicate threads occupied those short seasons.

I would have been ready to take the first apartment I looked at in Chicago. My mother and her urbanophobic boyfriend were driving me around getting lost and hating everything while I became increasingly belligerent in the sincere hope that they'd kick me out of the car and drive away. The first place was at the corner of North and Kedzie and probably really was a worse apartment than the one I ended up with: small, dingy, with matted gray carpet on the floor and a bathrobed older woman wandering the linoleum corridor outside. $525 with heat, however; fair enough. The landlord seemed nice; my family hated it. As we drove north and east into Lakeview my mom was relieved by the increasing number of restaurants and coffee shops where, she noted, it'd be easier for me to find work.

She had a point. The place on Ashland had several dismaying features, but it was technically just within the officially desirable neighborhood of Lakeview, and close to two trains. So I could ignore the fact that the tub, in lieu of a showerhead, had a sprayer attached to the faucet; that something in the rental agent's demeanor suggested that the place had been sitting vacant for many months; that the '70s-era stove was not hooked up to the wall. It was a lot of space for a studio and for my barely-existent collection of furnishings -- good windows, a whole separate kitchen with space for a table, walk-in closet standing between it and the bathroom. I knew almost nothing about renting apartments and was a little surprised and annoyed that the landlords wouldn't let me move in that very day. It would have been so easy: all my things from college were packed into and strapped on top of the car (including the newish, shiny orange bike I'd bought myself, whose naive cable lock would be neatly clipped the first night I moved in).

So we all went home to Grand Rapids three hours away and packed it all up again the next weekend. My mother and grandmother somehow found some empty corners of the car to stuff with household necessities. "They have dish soap in Chicago, you know," I grumbled in embarrassment.

I suppose I had an idea about making it on my own, starting from scratch. As if some silverware and cleaning supplies would corrupt that vision. Everyone -- and not just my family but also the man at the bank who set up my new account and the parade of tradesmen who would pass through my apartment trying to make it livable -- was already extremely dismayed that I was staking my claim in a town where I had no job and no prospects, with only two or three acquaintances, a liberal arts degree from a tiny anachronism of a college, and $3,000 of summer-job money to my name.

It took three anxious, humid weeks to find a full-time job. I did manage to get taken on by a temp agency right away. They sent me on a handful of $10/hour jobs across the city, the first being a convention where my task was to sit at a table and request that French doctors sign in as they entered the conference hall. The French doctors fell into two camps: those who resented my presence deeply and those who were delighted by the terrible French I served up to them. (All had horrible handwriting, which we later were tasked with decoding into names to be typed into a spreadsheet; many of the words we ended up with clearly could not have been the names of actual French people, but no one we asked seemed to care whether the spreadsheet had any particular connection with reality.) The caustic Frenchwoman in charge of the temps clearly sympathized with the former camp; she'd spent a lot of time fussing with our appearance (I'd bought new clothes for the job, which I still own and still dislike) and nearly sent another girl home for wearing what were essentially fancy sneakers.

"It is not that you must wear heels to look nice!" she spat. "Look at her! Those are flats! Still appropriate!" The heels of my shoes were not flat, just covered by my too-long pants, but I took in the extremely mild praise anyway, feeling that I'd passed a test while shrugging sympathetically at the sneakered girl.

I have mostly not been very good at the various low-wage jobs I've taken, such that I can still recall nearly every tidbit of praise I've received while doing them. At the movie theater I was appalled and flattered and then appalled at being flattered when the manager who'd hired me confided to a small group of us that she "only hired attractive people." ("What about Ashton?" "I didn't hire Ashton.") There and at a couple of my restaurant jobs I served the occasional customer who caught me in a rare moment of efficiency and said, "Boy, you're really good at what you do." Part of me yearned to let them know that this was false -- yes, in the obvious way that I was actually an cringing klutz 90% of the time, but more than that I wanted to say, resoundingly: "This is not 'what I do.'"

When I finally got a full-time job it was at a Persian restaurant about two miles away, and when I finally lied that I'd gotten another, better job in order to quit as quickly and neatly as possible, the manager, Saad, said he was not surprised because, in his words: "You are very great person." I was surprised and incredibly touched by this. It was true that he'd been one of the nicest people I'd worked with there -- sad-eyed, seeming a little too smart and refined for the work he had to do, a man who insisted on trying to fix the watch whose back I'd removed and been unable to replace before very gamely admitting it couldn't be done -- but still: I had been a terrible waitress. I'd dropped a full glass of wine onto a man's chest and then desperately, idiotically offered to bring soda water to help shrink the ocean of purple soaking his shirt; I'd sent an entire tray of heavy, expensive lamb dinners crashing to the floor and then, when the replacement order came out, slipped in precisely the same spot and done it all over again; I'd brought customers dishes they had no intention of ordering through cultural-linguistic misunderstandings.

Saad seemed to understand that this was not "what I did." And though, as my boss, he certainly had the right to disapprove of me because of it, instead he accepted my chaotic presence in the restaurant and liked me well enough anyhow. He believed in my fabricated future.

This was valuable to me because "what I did" was very unclear at the time. I went long stretches between in-person contact with anyone who knew anything about the kind of person I was and the kind of goals I had. You have to make small talk with a lot of people when you first move somewhere: repairmen, utility workers, landlords. In response to their reasonable questions about what I was doing with my life, I had nothing to say. I was just here, taking up space in Chicago. Even after I got the waitressing job, I couldn't quite say: "I'm a waitress." It wasn't a career. "I wait tables," I'd tell them flatly, daring them to press onward. And I vacillated between being comfortable moving through the world as a cipher and aching for someone to intuit what it was I really stood for.

Maybe that's part of what made my first months in Chicago feel so hyperreal --  that no one around me knew who I was. I was the only one in charge of perpetuating that entity; I couldn't pawn off parts of the task on the job I had and the routines I'd established and the friends I interacted with. There was no shorthand yet for processing my day-to-day existence, that series of constant collisions with a place that didn't know I'd become a part of it. 

This is much of the work of travel, too, I suspect. Such work is exhausting, but exciting -- all that room for reinvention. I'd do it the same way again.

Borderlands: Little Village/Marshall Square

I have always tended, somehow, to live on the edges of neighborhoods, so that even when I have technically lived in a neighborhood acknowledged to be "good" or "hip," people are still always asking, "Oh, is that still a part of that neighborhood?" when I name my intersection. There was the one barely in Lakeview, or was it Ravenswood, more or less neglected by the maps; the one uncomfortably far west in Logan Square (though the bars that are deliberately divey rather than unreflectively divey and the little record shops have crowded nearly to that line of longitude by now; so it always seems to go, "progress" nipping at my heels as the moving truck arrives); the one practically falling off the riverbank of Lincoln Square and splashing into Albany Park. And now this one, a thoroughly settled-feeling patch of greenery and architectural flourish allowed by luxury rather than dictated by the minimal level of civilization belonging to its decade. But still just one city block out of Rogers Park. By one measure it is within Edgewater Glen. I use this measure, because I like the name.

Is it a money thing? Are buildings on the boundary lines cheaper, no matter what boundary it is? I am extremely cheap. The cheapest apartment I ever lived in also took me the furthest afield from the white, coffeehouse-inhabited nucleus of Chicago where nearly everyone I know in this city lives. It was $500 a month for a building that was essentially my own -- actually just the upper floor of a garage, connected to the main building by a covered staircase. (The lady at the phone company trying to connect my line was distressed when I gave "Garage" as my apartment number; I think we settled on #2RG or something equally unwieldy as a compromise.) But it was satisfying to look at the little chunk of brick with bars across the windows from across the parklet behind it and know that I inhabited all that space myself.

You could get onto the roof, but not from my apartment -- you had to go through the window of the man who lived on the main building's second floor, who invited me up one early summer day to drink beer and listen to Loretta Lynn. He was in his 40s or early 50s, lived with a roommate with whom he shared shouting fights the other neighbors had complained about and speculated (incorrectly, I tentatively guess) to be lovers' quarrels, and had decorated the apartment in psychedelic style. A two-bedroom, it could have been mine; I was offered it by my landlord, but, at $600, I felt it more responsible to decline. 

In retrospect my brief acquaintance with this man -- possibly named Michael? -- likely had a foundation of essential sketchiness, but I have always been embarrassingly willing to assume that people's intentions are none other than those which they communicate to me. In this case, a friendly welcome to the neighborhood. Even if he did a) claim to have been Soundgarden's original manager, b) talk excessively about his young and hot Korean girlfriend who would soon be flying in from California, c) invite me to go dancing that evening with some friends of his in Millennium Park, and d) ask me to help slather tanning lotion across his pink, substantial back.

Well, okay, yes. I gingerly applied the tanning lotion. I weighed the dancing offer seriously before declining. Some surprising corners of our musical tastes overlapped; he lent me some CDs. Would I do the same today? Well, probably.

He'd lived "all over the city," Michael said, and this was "the Wild West." I'm not at all sure how long he'd lived in the area; my memory is of asking and receiving a vague non-response. He took pleasure in the Outlaws headquarters on the corner, and enlightened me with the anecdotes that had made its bomb-proof door and razor-wire-topped fence necessary. (Whenever I walked by I had a vision of the scene from Pee Wee Herman, domino-ing the whole line of motorcycles down.) He prepared me for the head-poundingly loud weekly Mexican music festival held in some large tent whose location I could never entirely pin down. I still don't know which road it stood or stands on. Its swooping top shimmered mirage-like from my back windows, planted somewhere in the wastelands between lumberyards and demolished lots and the Cook County Jail, whose white, alien, razor-wired forms I could also see. The cops were bribed to allow this festival to operate as loudly as it did, Michael told me, in the way that older men especially are pleased to demonstrate their knowledge of the secret, corrupt workings of things.

I was mainly glad to have met a neighbor. Later some college kids moved in, the earnest, vaguely Christian kind who had vacated my own apartment and helped my family (my mother shell-shocked by my chosen surroundings) lug my couple armloads of furniture up the stairs, and I met them too. But I was much too shy to unspool my tentative Spanish to most of the people on the block; I'd just smile at the kids playing streetwide games of hide and seek and work my way up to exchanging a sentence or two with the adults.

(The English-speaking Lawndale Gardens project was across the street, but that block seemed mostly self-contained, and I'm not sure I ever really met anyone who lived there. Maybe a couple of kids, whose soccer balls I'd lob back over the fence when they dropped in from the park.)

I biked down my old block of 25th Street again on Saturday for the first time in a couple of years and instantly felt again as I typically did in that neighborhood when it was sunny and I was walking around on the boulevards. (California and Marshall, namely; the immediate vicinity was called Marshall Square, another corner of Chicago almost nobody at all has ever heard of. Though it turns out it's where Stuart Dybek grew up, and there are churches and alleys I know from both his pages and my wanderings.) I felt light. Hazily happy, with no particularly strong sense of self to attach the feeling to. Just a kind of nectar in the air.

The sunshine seems more expansive down there, in the same way the sky is bigger in the West. It's enhanced by how I always get there from the North Side: down Damen through the two or three blocks of pitchy tunnels that run under the freight lines just north of 17th Street and finally reward you with the pastel murals of Pilsen and the tinkling bells of paletas and elotes carts.This is the eastern edge of Little Village, depleted by the County's needs and, one supposes, by some mid-20th-century act of slum clearance soon after it stopped being an ethnically Bohemian neighborhood. Half-blocks of fenced-in grass, littered with rubble, are patched here and there among two-flats. (A couple more vast, gloomy warehouses have been pulled down since I lived there.) But there's still a strong enough web of community to keep it feeling like a neighborhood.

It makes me some kind of hypocrite, I suppose, but I feel weirdly oppressed when I am in a crowd of other young white liberals, young white city-dwellers in general. The Damen bus as it nears North Avenue, for instance. Their opinions seem a cartoon copy of my own, their slightly bad taste a corruption of my guiding aesthetic. I become a claustrophobic grouch, sniping at snippets of overheard conversation. So much privilege, real or imagined, makes me itchy. 

It does not feel natural for a neighborhood to be organized that way. Over and over, I sink myself into the dense city and immediately start swinging my arms to make enough space. The borderlands where I've wound up -- they do have that.

You Guys Must Be Rich

“Occupy [Your City Here]” keeps going on, somewhat miraculously; I haven't been involved, have only been involved in activism by any stretch of the term tangentially and sporadically since I was in high school, really, and I wonder how I would have felt about it then, when it still seemed to me that my life would be spent in passionate protest. I am a little excited about it now, from a distance, feel that it is good that it is happening; generally I am pleased to see extensive and spontaneous use being made of our public spaces and freedoms, testing them to make sure they still work.

And it is interesting that class is starting to become a part of the public conversation that's harder and harder to ignore, if only in a simplified way. I thought about class as an anarchist youth, certainly, listened to proudly working-class hardcore bands and made conflicted steps towards claiming that identity for myself (all the while cringing against the philistinism of my surroundings and hungering desperately for a sense of security they couldn't provide). Still, the extent of what it meant to be working-class didn't fully develop for me until I went away to college and lived among honest-to-goodness rich kids for the first time and began taking the kind of jobs my family had had all their lives to support me in my leap away from my native culture. Until that point the “upper class” was a political concept that showed up mainly in newspapers and statistics. We stayed out of each other's way.

Sady Doyle has a wonderful essay on Tiger Beatdown that's been making the internet rounds, about her conflicted feelings toward OWS and the understanding of class that lumps an entire 99% together. I recognize intimately the milieu of the childhood she writes about, especially this:

“My first stepfather worked the night shift at a grocery store; it wasn’t understood that we were doing poorly. My best friend’s mother worked the deli counter at a different grocery store. You could live on that money . . . So, not all of us had office jobs, or the education or background required to get them. But we had our own houses, we were suburban, the idea that we weren’t firmly middle-class would have been an insult to us. Of course we were. Everyone was.”

Growing up, we lived roughly at the middle of a fairly smooth gradation along the river from the older, shabby blocks of wooden houses toward downtown (and south of those, the only housing project I knew about in my city) all the way to curving streets of well-kept two-story brick homes whose backyards sprouted play structures that looked more solid than our entire aluminum-sided ranch house. My first elementary school there was in the direction of the nicer neighborhood, from which most of my friends were drawn, but differences between us still seemed easily hopscotched over. They'd have the name-brand backpacks and fancier lunches, maybe, but we still played in the same parks. I think we all figured that aside, perhaps, from a handful of celebrities or people living in mythical ghettos or rural shacks, everyone was basically like us.

In fifth grade I transferred to a performing arts school in the inner city. Here I noticed for the first time a few kids who were clearly poorer than me. The trick at this school was somehow to remain authentic, of the street-savvy neighborhood, while still having Starter jackets and nice sneakers; those who couldn't manage both of these things were mercilessly teased. One of the few friends I managed to find was Breanne, a scrawny, clingy, loudmouthed blond kid who lived on the hill up close to the housing project. I went to her house maybe only once; I remember it being dark and cluttered inside, disorienting, and the outside covered in the kind of stick-on siding that resembles roof shingles. We were there just to pick up her homework or something; she never wanted to invite me over.

And in fact, I may have had her over only once as well. During that visit she let slip to my mom that I had a crush on Jake Bullock (10-year-old guitar prodigy, dreamy eyes beneath floppy brown hair) and I wanted to wring her neck for it I was so embarrassed. My mom had recently cleaned house, I think, when she came over; we looked good. Nonetheless I was unnerved the next day at school when Breanne said to me, “You guys must be rich, huh?”

No one has ever said that about my family before or since. In college the common, polite, getting-to-know-you question “What do your parents do?” was a nonstarter for me. “My mom's a receptionist, and my dad drives a truck” was, at an expensive liberal arts college, far distant from the sort of teacher/architect or lawyer/lawyer parings that had brought forth many of my classmates. In my year alone were at least two rumored heirs to big-name business fortunes. My family's history was a thick, blank wall for these interlocutors. What more is there to talk about, in a line of waitresses, cashiers, factory workers? What link can be drawn from those people to the girl waist-deep in Aeschylus and Plato? What is she doing here?

Unless you'd caught me in some chance shibboleth (my freshman-year surprise and envy that a friend had a house with fireplaces in it, for instance, or contemplating out loud pawning some of my stuff for enough money to join the Search and Rescue team), you would not have guessed my origins. More than once I've gotten some variant of “Oh, I thought your parents were professors or something!” In my last job, a woman I was training at one point said, when things had irreversibly deteriorated between us due to her near-pathological incompetence, “You must not have had to work through college.”

“I've always worked,” I barked back.

Throughout college I always had a pleasant on-campus job and frequently another less-sheltered service job. The first of these was in a movie theater where I sold tickets and concessions and cleaned. The selling was nominally my job but the cleaning composed the bulk of my time – clearing rafts of popcorn, food, and trash from the theaters after the lights went up, polishing lobby fixtures, wiping down bathrooms, which sometimes included soaking up vomit with a special powder that turned it into a solid substance that could be maneuvered into a dustpan. Even when we were behind the counter and no customers were around, we were not allowed to lean against the cabinets or sit on the one battered stool in the staff area. This connoted laziness. Instead we were to always be cleaning – scouring away grease and syrup from every crevice of every machine and counter. Nearly everyone was younger than me and passed the time saying terrible things about each other.

A boy in my circle of college friends asked, apparently in all innocence, “Why did you start working there? Do you just really like movies?”

And so that was a kind of class realization, there.

When I graduated and moved to Chicago I did so knowing that I'd fit well enough into whatever service job I could find. I could handle the shooting foot and ankle pains induced by long hours of standing, the forthright disrespect from customers and managers, and the fierce, bizarre rivalries that sprout up when people are forced to compete for the only things – the big tips, the days off – that make their jobs bearable. I stayed in my last bad office job for three years largely because I felt that the service industry was the only obvious alternative.

For me, being working-class has meant a certain instability at the foundation of my life. Will I be able to go to summer camp? Will we lose our house? Will I be able to afford to go to college even if I get in? Will I be able to afford my second year of college if I make it through the first one? My student loans? What if my parents are laid off? It has meant that I do not ever fully trust that things will be okay or that I will not suddenly be jettisoned from the ranks of the well-off and the cultured. And it has meant that a slender serpent of resentment slithers quickly through my ribcage when I sense the presence of those who have not been kept continually off-balance by these questions.

Just briefly. In a way I am frequently at home among these people, after all – they are so well-bred, congenial, have had the time to read books and think of art and never felt they were stealing anything from their families by doing so. But there is a little venom in me still, and all the foreign privilege I have lucked into may never be sufficient antidote.

"With fragile certainties"

There's an excellent and accurate article right now on Slate.com by Mark Oppenheimer on being a snob. How to define a snob? Let's say, perhaps: someone who has confused an aesthetic for an ethos. And undoubtedly I am a snob, if a self-aware one. (But then it's possible that all snobs are in fact highly self-aware, in that they cannot fail to acknowledge that their tastes are not those of the mainstream -- if their tastes were mainstream they would not be snobs; if they were unaware of this divergence, they would merely be eccentrics and not snobs at all.)

Snobbery as we generally understand it is class-based, but it is not only a phenomenon of the upper class. Any person or subculture acutely concerned with the appearance of authenticity partakes in snobbishness, I think. Snobbishness is always aspirational, but it is fanatical about avoiding the appearance of aspiration. One should have been born with an impeccable set of tastes; all one's choices must appear to emanate from the core of one's being – indeed they should hardly be choices at all, they are simply the natural consequences of one's way of life. This is why snobbery is much easier to pull off for the upper-class: they may have the advantages of not actually having to work very hard and of being tutored in good taste by those within their milieu.

The working-class snob has it harder. She can turn to those subcultures that define themselves in opposition to what one might call the “preppy” strain of snobbishness: punk rock, say, or the thug culture in which the ultimate accessory and badge of authenticity is a gunshot wound. But the bookish and shy are unlikely to successfully pass in such a scene. Instead, one ends up cobbling together an aesthetic from bits of books, movies, magazines, the elite of previous eras, and comes to develop an idiolect of signifiers which may overlap with those of other snobs but never connect one to a larger snob culture. One takes the Pillow Book in which one has scribbled hastily over the years and turns it into doctrine. For the working-class snob, this may resemble the Ten Commandments more than a style guide: without a unified model to aspire to, one works mainly with negative space to create a picture of the appropriate. No, one must not hang a television on a wall, or museum-shop reproductions of famous works of art. One must not wear Uggs or Crocs, or sweatpants, or sea-foam green, or anything with a prominent logo. One walks down every street saying no, no, goodness no, interrupted by the occasional yes, an approving nod in the direction of the object that knows its place, the person who understands how to behave.

Oppenheimer worries about the effects of his snobbishness on his young daughters, and it can certainly be toxic to family life. My childhood years were spent cringing at and railing against the bad taste of my surroundings. There were so many sources of outrage: the plastic bouquets at my father and stepmother's wedding, the enormous “antique,” “distressed,” “Asian” print of a tiger that my mother brought home from Meijer for our living room, the nattering television shows that nobody was really watching but which nobody would ever let me turn off.

Under the tyranny of my taste, over the years my mother has made steps towards snobbishness herself. Her tastes in music, movies and reading material have by this point all been heavily inflected by my own; she is surprised when I do not agree with her, that she can have picked up on the details of my snobbishness without discerning its larger shape. As a teenager, these near-misses irritated me more than if she had wholly ignored my preferences. She was too clearly trying. It ruined the whole thing.

In his essay Oppenheimer mentions, almost offhandedly, “the tragedy of the snob, which is that he needs to think he is grand just to think he is worthwhile.” When love of God or country or money are not enough to shape one's life, other standards are required. The snob knows that, judged on his or her inner qualities alone, she will always be sorely lacking. Better to locate success in the arbitrary, the anti-pragmatic, the obscure. One has so much less competition there, there where the appearance of competition itself is enough to disqualify any competitor. The sovereignty of the snob remains intact.