Sara likes to get dressed all on her own, without being asked. Which leads to some interesting outfits, I have to say. I always have to remind her to brush her teeth, though, and sometimes I forget.

Speaking of class, this article about college students turning to food stamps and food banks. Which....well, I didn't think it was a very good article. And kinda agreed more with some of the commentary on Seattlest. Not that there aren't valid reasons for some students to be getting food assistance, but...dude. That article made it sound like "OMG? So I blew all my money on BEER, and I'm like, so embarassed to call my MOM and ask for MORE? And I have to pay my CELLPHONE bill! So I think I might have to go the FOODBANK!"

I don't remember not helping with the laundry. No dryer, so wash days were a full family event. Since it was NM, usually by the time you got the 4 lines full, the stuff you started with was ready to come down. Doing dishes (when we were little, at least) was an exercise in bonding with our dad. We had a tall stool we'd sit on and "help."

Later, it became a responsibility that all but the cook rotated through, one I'd often get out of by helping with/making dinner. Funnily enough, doing dishes is actually very soothing to me. The bagel shop loved me because after the morning rush, I'd always volunteer to do the dishes, which they hated. For me, it was a guaranteed 45 uninterrupted, people-free minutes to decompress, play in the water and relax.

Most skills my brother may have missed (out of sheer laziness. The boy looks for shortcuts,) the Army took care of. He *can* fold stuff up so neatly, it looks like it's in a department store. However, he reverts to the roll'n'stuff method most of the time.

His feeding habits suck. He can cook, but again with the shortcuts. He's made some truly foul "meals" for just himself because he doesn't want to get another pot down. He does much better for the kids.

Sara likes to get dressed all on her own, without being asked. Which leads to some interesting outfits, I have to say.

No, I don't! And they are not...oh, wait.

Can I have her gold star, anyway?

Its like in whichever Anne of Green Gables book where Anne and Diana (I think) go off to college and find someone to keep house for them. It was a full time job.

Diana didn't get to go to college. Her mother didn't think it was appropriate for a girl to have too much education. Diana stayed in Avonlea, got married, had children and set up house.

mm, well in terms of economic class. I think the useful definitions are: 1) working class - includes the poor ( A lot sociologists divide the poor into a separate subclass).

2) middle classes (professional/bureaucratic/tecnical/small business) still make their living mostly from wages and worklives are still pretty much controlled in the larger sense but have some control over day to day or hour to hour. Also more chance to exercise decision making. In some cases (small business) some of the income is profit, but overwhelming it is wages and much of what is formally profit is still in practical senses wages (i.e. tied directly to how hard and well you work that dividends from stock in a pick corporation is not). (Some would clump everyone but the small business and self-employed professionals into the working class. Lumpers and splitters too: not just paeleo anthropologists).

3) Owner class - may or may work (and even work hard) but can get enough income without working that work is not needed. Again though there can be some distinctions between Ms.-doesn't-need-to work, Ms. hundred-millions and Bill Gates.

There are a bunch of arguments people can have over the specifics, but if we are really talking class there should not be a lot. If you get beyond a handful of classifications you are not talking classes you are talking demographics.

========================== I think definitions along these lines make discussions of things like class mobility a lot more meaningfully. Note that this is economic class, not social class. I think what people have been talking about as social class can be talked about much more clearly as something other than class - perhaps "caste" to steal a term from another culture. ================== In terms of mobility, it is true that the U.S. historically had greater economic class mobility that the rest of the world. Since the early to mid seventies most of Europe beats us in class mobility. A working class or poor girl or boy in France has a better chance of becoming middle class or rich than one in the U.S. A middle class girl or boy in France has a greater chance of growing up to become rich than a middle class girl or boy in the U.S. In spite of the presence of a landed aristocracy, I think the UK may actually be better than us in economic class mobility, certainly not much worse.

Can I have her gold star, anyway?

Hee.

Middle-class and Poor: Work for their money

Rich: Money works for them!

I'm so used to doing my own laundry, it was quite the dilemma when I got to Prague and asked about laundry. There was a crew of little old ladies and work study students who's scrub your clothes by hand for some minimal fee per pound. I couldn't get quite comfortable with it, it seemed too personal and just....by hand. A friend got a flat with a washer/dryer and after much hilarity that ensued as we tried to translate the directions, I mostly used that. Until it couldn't get my soot-embedded jeans really clean. Then I took it to the hand laundry service. The jeans were probably the cleanest they'd been since the fabric was woven, but they'd also been aged a couple years. They must have scrubbed the everloving shit out of them.

A working class or poor girl or boy in France has a better chance of becoming middle class or rich than one in the U.S. A middle class girl or boy in France has a greater chance of growing up to become rich than a middle class girl or boy in the U.S.

I wonder if this is really true. If it is, I'd say it has a lot to do with the (relative) uniformity of education, including cultural and social expectations on the part of parents, teachers, and the system.