I want to see this movie.

Now I don’t remember what things were like back in 1980, but my guess is they were pretty different.  Things can’t always have been as bad as they are now, right?   I was home last month helping my parents go through some boxes in Austin just before they moved to Colorado full time and we found the receipt from my hospital stay when I was born.

I was born at Stamford Hospital in Stamford, CT 45 days premature.  I was soon transfered to Yale-New Haven Hospital for an eight day stay in the neonatal intensive care unit.  I was jaundiced and my surfactant was inadequate but a week in the incubator did me some good.  The total cost of my 8 day hospitalization?  $2964.15.  In 2008 dollars that would be $7649.39.   Yet today, that same hospital stay would be approximately $14-19,000.  And if you look closer you’ll see that my entire hospital stay was covered by my insurance.  Would the same be true today?  Luckily, I haven’t been admitted to a hospital since then and I’m hoping that doesn’t change any time soon.

I was going to say for better or worse – but it’s definitely just for better – I wasn’t particularly conscious of the idea of class growing up. I was aware, via my mother’s constant involvement with charity organizations for poor women and children, of stark differences between my life and those of some children whom she worked with. I knew that I was fortunate and was taught to be thankful for everything I had. I could recognize that there wasn’t even complete equality among my friends, but what I wasn’t conscious of were the implications of class. That class – a label over which really no individual has any control at the onset of life – would shape my perceptions, my actions, my future, my culture, everything.

There was an article in the New York Times today about Ruby Payne, a woman who’s written a few semi-scientific anecdote-laden books regarding the influence of class in our society.

“Your class, Payne says, determines everything: your eating habits, your speech patterns, your family relations. It is possible to move out of the class you were born into, either up or down, she says, but the transition almost always means a great disruption to your sense of self.”

In my adult life, I’ve experienced a progressively increasing awareness of class. In part I’d say that can be attributed to a similarly increasing level of class-diversity. Dartmouth, as you can probably imagine, was not remarkably diverse when it came to class. I’d say 90% of my friends had similar upbringings and experiences. While our religions, family histories, likes and dislikes, interests, skills, talents, and personalities were enormously varied, we approached life with the same set of upper middle class history. Certainly it was not equality, but there wasn’t great disparity. Even those who fell outside the upper and lower ranges of the norm seemed to have adopted much of the same culture – perhaps out of similar educational histories. To this day, I think my time at Dartmouth stands out in my mind as being a time when I could just know people easily. When despite differences there was enough of a common foundation that connections could be easily made. I didn’t have to traverse the lands of guilt or inequality to meet the other person. Certainly it helped that everyone was, for the most part, also quite intelligent.

While veterinary school did bring with it a slightly more class-diverse population, we were still 70 white or asian women and 7 men, all college educated, 80-90-% from the northeast. Even within that population I still found myself closest to the private liberal art school educated women with similar cultural (class) histories.

Most recently I’ve felt the influence of class in terms of dating. A few weeks ago, I got a message from a guy my age. He’s a city sanitation worker. He didn’t finish high school. He’s never left the U.S. He drinks beer and rides motorcycles and watches baseball. I said immediately I wasn’t interested. While most will walk away at this point, he persisted. How could I know so quickly? he demanded. “Where to begin?” I thought. And how to say it?! It’s such a delicate issue. Going back to the quote from the New York Times article, I can extract an idea – if moving between classes requires disruption of your sense of self, then wouldn’t the idea of dating across classes bring upon a similar disruption?

How disrupted am I willing to be? Apparently not very much. That last example was quite extreme. Even if I strictly limit myself to college educated reasonably employed 20 somethings in New York I still can find plenty of class distinctions that make me uncomfortable. I know I shouldn’t judge a person by what school they went to, where they’re from, what their parents do, or what books they’ve read – but all of those things are class indicators. They’re indicators of ways of approaching the world. I’m instantly either intrigued or disinterested as a result of them. This isn’t a evolutionary strength thing – I’m not looking to mate anytime soon – it’s merely a level of comfort. I want the basic framework to already be the same – so that it’s not our histories, but our ideas and passions that make us different. I should note, it’s not just those lower on the scale who would suffer but also those above. I mean, how could I honestly expect to be comfortable day to day with someone who has a driver, summers in the Hamptons and doesn’t know the value of walking 5 extra blocks to save $2 on yogurt? Given that I’ve barely got my own “sense of self” delineated I have very little interest in challenging it at all.

Of course the implications of class don’t end with my personal life. What about my professional life? I often lament the veterinary workplace. I envision my former Dartmouth classmates working in their professional offices with a narrow segment of the class spectrum. The reality is, of course, that every office has class diversity. Secretaries, maintenance workers, bosses, and CEOs and everything in between. The difference, I imagine, is that they work with more than three to four people at their level. The other day at work a summer volunteer stopped me. “You’re a doctor?” she said. “Yes,” I responded. “Can I talk to you about being a vet?” she asked, “Because I’m a Columbia undergraduate and I’m up here all day cleaning up shit and not learning a thing and it just seems ridiculous and I want to quit.” I had to smile to myself. I also had to stop myself from telling her it was never going to get better. She’d be cleaning up shit for 40 years in a service industry profession with probably no more than three or four similarly educated colleagues.

Next weekend I go back to Dartmouth for my five year reunion. I’m ecstatic about seeing my friends but I’m also looking forward to the comfort of it. Being in a place where there’s an understanding of where we all come from to make it just that much easier to be me and be excited by people.

I imagine that just as there is a spectrum of people for every debated topic, there is a spectrum of people when it comes to comfort with class interactions. I can’t say that crossing class boundaries will always make me as uncomfortable or dissatisfied as it does now. In truth also, probably the very structure of the class that I came from perpetuates this discomfort by isolating itself as it does. Maybe if I hadn’t been so class-limited for the first 25 years of my life I wouldn’t be so limited in my comfort with other classes? Unfortunately, however this reflects upon me, I haven’t really got the heart to test myself just yet.

I see the same scenario at work frequently. Take the cases of those patients who perhaps start off with a decent prognosis but become critically ill. At admission the owners leave their initial deposit, listen to us ramble about possible complications, and leave thinking things will go fine. But let’s say they don’t go fine, and each day we call and we say, “Fluffy doesn’t look so good, we need to do x, y, and z to decide how to direct further therapy. Unfortunately that will cost $### so we’ll need to increase your estimate accordingly.” Most owners will agree and some pets will recover, but other pets will continue to decline to the point where then both veterinarian and owner are invested emotionally and financially. There’s no real way to separate the decision to pursue further therapy from those investments. No veterinarian wants a client to spend $10,000 only to have the pet die, but I’ve seen it happen countless times. I can’t yet discern how much of it is purely owner insistance and how much is driven by our investments as doctors.

Of course, this theory applies to lots of life situations as well. Somewhere in my first year of veterinary school I had the sneaking suspicion that maybe this profession wasn’t 100% what I was looking for… But I do enjoy the science of it, and I’m good at it, and as time passed I became more and more invested in it. I’ve spent my entire early twenties in training so I feel like I have to be a veterinarian just because of that sacrifice. The logic of the prior discussion, though, argues that when I have to make employment decisions in the future I should, in fact, not consider prior investments, only future potential. That’s tough though.

So what brought all this on? One of my friends at work today said in response to my justifications of being good at this work, “I feel like you could have been good at anything you wanted to do.”

Well yeah, maybe. And that’s a fantastic compliment, but it really hit home.
I could have been good at a lot of other things.

Example 1: Zoe Keating

Zoe Keating – Sun Will Set
This piece of “layered cello” is alluring and calming. And even more impressive live. A single cello and digital looping device with foot pedals.

Example 2: John Irving

“When he needed to hold her hand, his fingers could see in the dark.”
An exquisite sentence.

Example 3: Eva Solo

The teamaker.
Beauty in design.

Example 4: Chromasia

“there’s nothing on“
“motion blur“
Consistently appealing and exceptional photography.

Other famous Anne’s (with an e, of course)…

Anne Frank
Queen Anne
Anne Boleyn
Anne Hathaway
Anne Heche
Anne Archer
Anne Ramsey
Anne Geddes
Anne Rice
Anne Bradstreet
Anne Sexton

That’s all I can come up with on my own. Apparently, there are lots though.

I was on a plane to Denver a month ago and after I had settled myself down in my seat, I watched the rest of the passengers boarding. As a group of women in homesewn muslin dresses wearing nametags proclaiming Jesus Christ their Savior and bearing the name of their elder walked past, I felt something akin to loathing wash over me. I was sort of appalled at myself for having this visceral reaction, particularly towards a generally inoffensive law-abiding group as these young Christians. As I thought about it I realized that I was projecting my own frustration with politics in this country upon these women. I was blaming them for George W. Bush’s reelection, when in fact, more than half the voting population is responsible. When I think back on the past few years, I think I actually know where I went wrong…

In the fall of 2000, I spent four month living in Copenhagen, Denmark. My memories of my time there are not merely viewed through rose-colored glasses – my mental image of Denmark practically has a halo of perfection surrounding it. The country was clean, the air was clear, the people were beautiful, the people rode bikes to work and waited for lights at crosswalks. I was almost certain that Denmark was the closest the world could get to the embodiment of a Utopia. The day I arrived (as a student with a visa) I was issued a health care card and assigned a doctor near my residence. As part of my sociology class, we learned all about end-of-life care and eldercare provided free of charge for citizens. In my political science class we learned about the numerous political parties that are represented in the Folketing (Parliament) and studied the ground breaking environmental legislation set forth. It all almost seemed to good to be true. Certainly Denmark has issues of its own. A nation which once existed as 5 million citizens who looked alike, spoke the same language, and practiced (or didn’t practice) the same religion, is today facing some of the issues posed by an influx of foreign immigrants (mostly from Turkey). But it was my impression that these issues would be gradually resolved so long as the immigrants accepted the premise of the welfare state mentality: pay 70-80% income tax and you’ll be well taken care of. It sure sounds like a lot, but hearing that teachers and doctors are paid approximately the same salary seemed like just one evidence that it’s worth it. After all, where’s the logic in saving someone’s life just to send them to a school system that sets them up for failure because the teachers who care aren’t paid enough to subsist. AND… the people seemed happy! Of the students I spoke to, there didn’t seem to be as wide a range of socioeconomic variation as I’ve experienced in the US. There were certainly those who had more than others, but the pursuit of having more didn’t seem to occupy the same lofty position. So then, after living for 4 months in this seeming perfection, I returned to the US – to a country whose election turmoil had just been decided by the Supreme Court (democracy? election by the people?). It was a hard pill to swallow…

At the time I thought, “How bad can it be? George W. Bush seems like an entertaining guy – I’m sure he’ll have smart people backing him up.” And I always really liked Colin Powell! The truth is, I’m not really sure that it’s gotten all that bad. I don’t agree with the premise of the war in Iraq and I find the lack of renewal of the assault weapons ban, the repealing of important protective environmental legislation, and the lowering of taxes (among other things) completely irresponsible and nearly abhorrent, but I’m not convinced that “things” are so different. What I’m most upset about, the wound that was reopened and salted in November, is that the system is just so blatantly not designed for honest discourse. I know that the US is never going to be like Denmark – that model is hardly applicable, but the realization that we’re trapped in this stagnant two party system where all that matters is money is depressing. There are plenty of other political parties and great political minds in this country who will never have a voice. So what to do? Where to go with all these thoughts?

I don’t want to have a fatalistic attitude and I don’t want to be so diametrically opposed to half the population. Last summer someone told me I was “such a Northerner” – by which I think they meant liberal intellectual who wears cashmere turtleneck sweaters. As a person who certainly has biases against “Southerners” or “born-again Christians” it felt weird to be on the receiving end of the bias. In reality, these labels all seem pretty stupid. What I’m hoping is that maybe sometime soon I’ll just feel like an “American” again and stop wishing so desperately that I were actually Danish.