When people meet me, everything gets shot to hell when I tell them my age and position in life.
I can come across as reasonably intelligent in person, but I don’t get much respect when people find out the particulars. In San Francisco, usually it’s because these people went to Berkeley or Stanford, or figured that if they had grown up around here they would’ve gone to Berkeley or Stanford. Often they are casually condescending in this way that is all, like, “Gee, that is pretty smart of you!” I think they think they’re being encouraging, or something. This is annoying.
When people from my past reconnect with me, they generally assume that I must have a doctorate at this point or I must have gone to some Incredible School and that I must have aspirations along the lines of Running the Free World or something.
Then I tell them the particulars about my life, and it’s like they are all collectively saying, “Wow Melodee, you sure had a good thing going ten years ago, and you clearly fucked it up.”
This, too, is annoying.
Here’s the problem: we basically have three ways of judging success in a person. They are:
1) Academic success.
2) Professional success, i.e., “I make shit tons of money.”
3) Personal success, i.e., marriage and children.
Usually people can feel secure in at least one of those three. Sometimes this security is pretty shaky, but it’s there. Lots of people feel secure in two of those things, and some people feel secure in all three.
But if you can’t claim ANY of those as a success, well then, DAMN, you must be a loser.
I think part of my personal problem is that I never put stock in any of those things. I know I say that and I sound like I’m full of shit, considering, but really, that’s just the way it pretty much has always been for me. As a kid, I never gave much of a damn what other people were doing enough to compare myself to them much either positively or negatively. This is actually called being “self-centered.” I like to think of it as being “wise beyond my years” or “damn I was SO SECURE when I was younger and ‘self-centered’; why can’t I be cool like that now?! wtf?!”
Maybe it’s part of having grown up Jewish and around a lot of affluent people who had happy families and impeccable academic credentials, but I never thought that those things had much influence on whether or not someone was a total douchebag. Because believe you me, some of the biggest douches from douchetown I knew were Stanford grads making $250K+ with husbands/wives from similar backgrounds and perfect children who perfectly enjoyed tormenting me so much so that I spent much of Hebrew school in fifth grade HIDING IN THE FUCKING BATHROOM so no one would bother me. These perfect children all went on to Ivies/Stanford/Berkeley and are busily repeating the cycle.
This is why people get annoyed with me for being judgmental, I think. It’s because I’m judgmental about things that other people let slide. Like, it’s OK to be totally illiterate if you had a 4.0 from Yale, say, but for me, I don’t care about your GPA or your higher education or your socioeconomic background or your VP position at Google or the fact that your family owns a fucking vineyard in Sonoma (these are true-to-life examples), I DO care that you haven’t read any Virginia Woolf past Mrs. Dalloway and can’t, in fact, recall the fucking main character of that book (HINT: it’s in the fucking title).
Other people are all, oh, it’s OK he spells “weird” like “wierd,” he’s just not that good at spelling. No, it’s not. “Oh, it’s OK that she consistently puts commas outside of the quotation marks like she’s from the fucking UK, she majored in biochemistry at blahblahblah.” She’s a moron. It’s fine, most people think she’s better than 99.9% of the population. She certainly does. It won’t kill her to have one person who thinks she’s not so great. Especially coming from one person who is so CLEARLY a loser in others’ eyes.
Everyone thinks this is all sad and sour grapes, but really, it’s not. It’s just annoyance that other people can’t come up with better ways to be an elitist asshole.
“Better ways to be an elitist asshole” = the how-to book I’ll be writing after this semester’s over.
Posted by melodeeisawesome 
