Oh, I just checked my grade for summer term and I got an A (only took one class). Yay!

Yay Jen!

Bad job, Mumter-Cow and Dadter-Cow! No housepoints for you!

We're doomed. Pirates are clearly the insidious parasitic import that's going to suffocate all the native species.

Duh. Pirates. Of course they're going to show up where they aren't wanted and be all usurpy and swashbuckly.

sighs

There are no pirates in JayTown. Not even a little bit. But there are many, my goodness, MANY, highly unattractive people, whom 20 years ago it would have been perhaps socially acceptable to lable common, and whom it really WOULD NOT be acceptable to call such now. But - my goodness, it's like a social anthropology expedition, venturing into the post office.

I realise that this is highly obnoxious of me. I am highly obnoxious. But I pretty much have kept my nose in a book since, well, birth (Harold Smith's line in Twin Peaks: "I grew up in Boston; well, no, actually I grew up in books." had me jumping and pointing and nodding like a crazy lady), and I spent my formative years being ostracised for not being appropriately working class, or at best looked upon as a strange, incomprehensible species of alien creature ("tha's gorra reet big 'ouse, 'an't tha? 'As 'ta got servants?") on the basis of being middle class...well, I don't know. I just feeling every bit as much a stranger in a strange land as I ever did in Cairo. Which is, of course, why I'm so happy to bugger off around the world - I'm used to not belonging.

Man. The extraordinarily unattractive things that people choose to do to their hair. And the clothes - dear heaven, the unbecoming clothes. And the grim neccesity of breeding as soon as one has hit puberty.

I am the most atrocious snob. I'm perfectly pleasant to everyone, and for the most part they're all very nice, but I really feel like I'm from another planet. And that is far stranger when one isn't making one's way home past women in billowing black with veiled faces, with the scent of night-blooming jasmine and the sound of the call to prayer filling the evening air.

Anyone who wants to Marcie me on the basis of that post really does so with my blessing, because I realise that I sound truly obnoxious.

Bad job, Mumter-Cow and Dadter-Cow! No housepoints for you!

Hee.

Anyone who wants to Marcie me on the basis of that post really does so with my blessing, because I realise that I sound truly obnoxious.

immediately shuns Fay FOREVER

Anyone who wants to Marcie me on the basis of that post really does so with my blessing, because I realise that I sound truly obnoxious.

And thus the great dichotomy between how we see ourselves and how others see us, because that post was, to me, fantastic. There are courses in Modern British literature studying writers who aren't that good. Self-deprecation, northern English accents and exotic travel. I want to nominate that post for the Booker.

Man. The extraordinarily unattractive things that people choose to do to their hair. And the clothes - dear heaven, the unbecoming clothes. And the grim neccesity of breeding as soon as one has hit puberty.

I could say the same thing about the grim little Rust Belt town where I'm living now, m'dear. Not with as much style as you did, but I could. And although I don't say it out loud often, I think it *quite* a lot.

If you're perfectly pleasant to everyone, I don't think you qualify as the most atrocious snob -- unfortunately, I'm perfectly sure there are people who walk around all the time making everyone around them choke on their scorn and sneering.

It must be so disconcerting -- it's where you're from, and it's not. And now I'm wishing SusanW were still hanging out here, because IIRC she feels a similar dislocation and from-another-planetness when she goes back to the town she grew up in as well.

I would have said estranged, Fay, not obnoxious. But I do know the feeling of being damned when I come F2F with my own snobbery.

I'm a snob too, Fay, if having a generalized distaste for the average post office crowd makes one a snob.

On the plus side, I'm sure they have a generalized distaste for you, too. People who have nothing in common tend not to be fast friends.

I grew up in one of the most anti-intellectual, rabidly right-wing towns you can imagine. (There was a group that armed themselves because the John Birch Society had gone soft on Communism.) This was a town where most of the kids got married in the months after high school and went right to work and started families. I never fitted in - I had less in common with most of them than I'd have with ... well, I can't imagine. I've gone back once, for my father's funeral, and I'll never set foot in that hell-hole again.

Edited to add the point to all this - you're much kinder than I am, Fay.