I don't want to sound like poor pitiful me from a state school, here, but my career path would be very different if I had understood, at 19 or 20, that unpaid internships = connections = future jobs. It honestly never occured to me.

I'm still amazed at how clueless I was about practically all the realities of the working world when I was a student at--what were we calling them?--One of The Many Right Colleges. The information was all there for me to take through internships, the career planning office, etc., but since I didn't know the impressions I'd picked up from my isolated little Alabama town were wronger than a wrong thing, I didn't get slapped in the face by reality until I was a senior in the middle of a job search.

what ever happened to the concept of the deserving poor? It's as if poverty has become a symptom of laziness and moral depravity, rather than something that can easily happen to the non-wealthy when the job goes at the same time that the medical bills come.

I wonder if that's cyclical, actually.

Yeah, whatever happened to genteel poverty anyway?

The genteel poor learned to work for a living. If they're really genteel, they work at nonprofits or universities or art galleries. If not, they end up middle-class and take their family heirlooms to Antiques Roadshow.

For that matter, what ever happened to the concept of the deserving poor? It's as if poverty has become a symptom of laziness and moral depravity

This is a foreseeable effect of the pervasive myth of social mobility. If "obviously" anybody who works hard enough can get ahead, then anybody who does not get ahead didn't work hard enough. It is a logical fallacy clean and pure enough to use in rhetoric classes. Alas that many people would not know the word "fallacy" if it jumped up and mugged them.

Well, FWIW, he was a very nice and chatty guy, even to so lowly a person as the front desk receptionist, and he never came to the office so I have no idea what he looked like.

Yaz was famously warm and friendly with the fans. Hence, his longstanding popularity.

Except for those from DC. Substitue "money" with "power" and you're spot on.

Somebody once made a documentary about limousine culture in NYC, DC and LA and how they each meant different things. NYC = money, DC = power, LA = celebrity. Kind of obvious, but still interesting to realize that there are different "currencies" in different cultures.

Completely and utterly uninteresting to people once they ascertained that I was not a lobbyist or something.

During the dot-com boom, I attended a party thrown to celebrate the opening of Alexa. I wore a namecard listing my current employer, an investment bank.

You never SAW conversations end so fast as when I explained that I was a technical writer, not an analyst. I was bearing The Dreaded Production-Class Cooties.

think I'd love to be a fly on the wall at a few DC gatherings, but I'm very glad I don't have to play there.

Same here, juliana. I'm not cut out for that kind of power play.

didn't know the impressions I'd picked up from my isolated little Alabama town were wronger than a wrong thing,

Like what, Susan? What were things you wished you knew earlier? (Just curious.)

I think this is a fairly common first question no matter where you are.

I found it refreshing that at my brother's wedding in Holland, I chatted with probably 50 people and no one asked what I did. At big parties here, it is usually the first thing to come up. It isn't always a mercenary question, sometimes it's basic small talk, but we define ourselves by our job more here than in most European countries, I think. In certain cities (NYC, LA, DC) it can be obviously and completely mercenary, but even in smaller places I've lived it comes up right away. I have, as an exercise, tried NOT to mention my or ask about their job to people, and it's HARD.

This is a foreseeable effect of the pervasive myth of social mobility. If "obviously" anybody who works hard enough can get ahead, then anybody who does not get ahead didn't work hard enough. It is a logical fallacy clean and pure enough to use in rhetoric classes. Alas that many people would not know the word "fallacy" if it jumped up and mugged them.

What's the fallacy? I only see a faulty premise. Or does a faulty premise also constitute a logical fallacy (I don't remember). Or is the first premise "All those who work hard might get ahead," or in other words, "Some who work hard get ahead"?

NYC = money, DC = power, LA = celebrity.

Or at certain times of the year, "prom."

Or at certain times of the year, "prom."

Bwhahah... good one (especially insofar as it applies to buffistas also).