I just phoned TC, because I have yet to receive my diploma in the mail. As usual, they immediately started to blame me, "did you send back the form with the label? did you change your address?" I haven't heard from them since May except to beg me for money. Remember what I was saying about incompetence there? It's bad. One giant epitome of why people hate bureaucracy.

I read an article in Academe, the magazine of AAUP, about social class in elite universities and how it is completely ignored on the discourse on diversity:

http://www.aaup.org/publications/Academe/2005/05ja/05jacase.htm

I was happy to read it (and happy it was written), because I made a similar argument (although not as eloquently) on a fellowship application I sent in. You see, neither of my parents ever earned their Bachelor's degree, and, although by the time I hit high school we were comfortably middle-class or even upper-middle-class, my most formative years were cut from the stalk of urban working class culture. In my summer (and winter and spring) job I worked with ex-cons and druggies, my father never lost his social class roots, no matter how much he tried to hide it in a big car and a country club membership, and I felt an awkwardness unlike any other when I ended up in graduate school at an Ivey League. People spoke differently, carried themselves differently, most had parents with graduate degrees . . . many even being academics themselves.

I felt like I had to act like a different person when I was there. There were large communication barriers between me and my advisors or colleagues, and it took all of my intelligence and many hours of focused self-consciousness to adjust my entire habitus to that of the social elite. It was somewhat relieving to leave there. I feel like I can wear my union and work gear without having to wonder whether others thought I was being "ironic", and I can let fly a cuss word every other utterance. I felt like my whole being was being ripped in two when I was there. Two of me living in one body – the slowly forming academic from a socially elite university, and the ingrained existential habits of someone whose been working since he was 14 (in school or not) and whose parents are part of the "uneducated".

The article I read also confirmed for me why it was I had such difficulty getting my parents to understand education for it's own sake. You see, that is something only the social elite could ever really afford as a luxury. To most working-class people, education is how you move up the social latter, it's how you get a high-paying job, it's where you go to learn job skills. I mean what the hell are you going to do with a graduate degree in the humanities????? I always had to frame my education goals in the context of a job and making money, otherwise there would be little understanding or even support from my family. Not that they cognitively decided to be unsupportive, rather they didn't truley understand in an empathetic way, because their lives provided them with a horizon that cannot understand education for-its-own-sake. I didn't come to really start understanding it until after 6 years of higher education. It's like asking someone to understand something you said in Cajun. Fat chance they're going to get it.

I just got a call from a community college for an interview for an adjunct position. Cross your appendages.