Class
The last of the calluses are wearing off my hands. I noticed that this week. For the first time in my life my hands are going all soft and girly, yet another sign of my upward mobility. The last of my calluses are on my right hand, on the palm pad just below my middle finger, and also in the folds between my index and thumb. Oh, the scars are still there from box cuts and a hundred other little things, but these too are fading. Soon my hands will be completely smooth, the undeniable mark of white collar living.

I'm having a few issues with this, but not as many as I thought I would. When I got my apartment through Harvard housing service, I bragged on the helpfulness of the workers there. "There were so many listings at Harvard Housing that you wouldn't find anywhere else! How cool!"

"That's because the owners want the right kind of people to rent from them." my co-worker said.

I felt sick suddenly. So now I'm "the right kind of people?" Why is that true today, when it wasn't true a year and a half ago? Eighteen months ago I was setting up the Brentano's bookstore in Copley Plaza. I had never been in a mall so upscale, and decided on my lunch break to step into Tiffany's, because I had read Truman Capote's book _Breakfast_at_Tiffany's_ and wanted to see why it was so special. As I walked around the jewelry cases, I kept my hands stuck in my pockets because they were full of box cuts from unloading store shipments and assembling displays. I didn't want anyone in this nice store to see my messed up hands, although they could probably guess the condition of my hands from the clothes I was wearing - you don't dress nicely to set up a shop.

So from there, all full of box cuts, to here, getting an apartment through an exclusive advertisement, in just eighteen months. My calluses, won through hard labor and sweat, slowly fading to nothing. All because I finished my bachelor's degree at M. T. S. U. (a blue-collar state university if ever there was one) and moved to Boston. And once in Boston, I bought my way into the Harvard name and prestige by taking out $10,000 dollars in loans per semester at Simmons college. I work for Harvard. I'm not even full time staff. How is it that I'm now "the right kind of people"? I feel only a little changed. I suppose people born into this think nothing of being "the right kind of people" their whole lives.

PBS is supposed to be working on a big sociological effort called "Class in America" that's due out sometime in the next year. I'm really interested in what they're going to find, what they have to say. Mostly because I still don't know what to say myself, about how weird this makes me feel sometimes. I feel lucky to have made it where I am today. I know I deserve it all, because I've worked damn hard to get here and still work hard all the time to keep what I've got. But there are times when I feel out of place, and fail to understand the context and attitudes of those around me. And that's because I grew up blue collar, working class of America. Now that I'm in academia, everything's different. This is its own section of society, and it's going to take me a while to adjust.