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Feb. 15th, 2019 06:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
unicorndukeI'm always fascinated by like, aspirational middle class shit as seen through commercials
like there was a febreeze commercial and it's like, all these soft things in your house hold in the odor! How awful! your house is absolutely sterile otherwise so it must be that!
I'm like, I'm staring at a giant hole in my parents ceiling right now because the plumbing was leaking all over. It's definitely the 25 year old couch causing smell issues that I'm really concerned about.
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Date: 2019-02-16 12:21 am (UTC)Actually my community, growing up, was a fascinating intersection of those two things. We had honest rural decay, underemployed disadvantaged "trashy" rural decay, and then this gradual-to-overwhelming influx of aspirational middle class pink and white collar bullshit that, in the late 90s, mostly overtook my hometown-- it went from being mostly farmland into being bedroom communities for the state capital and a few other big white-collar employers-- and then in the economic recession since then, much of it has been foreclosed upon, and has ebbed hardcore into opium epidemic "trash" stuff again, and it's... sociologically fascinating, but kind of awful really.
When I was a kid we had cheap linoleum over patched plywood covering the rotting subfloors, and carefully handmade replacement windows for all the ones that had been busted out while our house was abandoned, and we dug trash out of the gardens and kept our tetanus shots up to date and never wore shoes and played in the hose in the mud and went naked for most of the summer because nobody was there to see, kept chickens as pets and got horses when we were horse crazy but never did anything with them, and then my one really good friend had this laundry-dryer-sheet-scented house built from a kit that came assembled in halves on a truck that they'd then added a second storey onto at great expense, and everything was like, that aesthetic with pale blue and white gingham and decorative motifs of geese in bonnets and blonde wood accents with big plaid cotton bows on shit and her neighbors' houses were right up close and she was the first person I knew to have a Nintendo, her dad flew planes and ran a big construction company and her mom was an ER nurse, and my other really good friend lived in the upstairs of a 19th-century house with the downstairs all stripped to studs and you had to walk through a careful path through piles of salvage-junk to get to the stairs to the inhabitable parts of the house (four rooms and a bathroom), and it was heated only by wood stove and always smelled of smoke and spices from the decorative pomanders her mother stored in the extra quilts you always needed when you got out of range of the stove, and we'd go out back and dare each other to jump off the abandoned silo foundation nine feet down into the pile of gravel where the train tracks used to be. Her neighbors were close, too, on three sides, but they were old mill housing from when the town used to be a textile milltown, in the 1850s, and nobody new had really come since the mill shut down in about 1890. Her dad did odd handyman jobs and her mom ran a freelance daycare.
I dunno. It came as a shock to me to realize that my mom grew up middle-class suburban and was in her own turn faintly horrified by our freewheeling youth, at times. She'd put out a sprinkler to pretend we had a lawn, but we'd use it to make mudpuddles and splash in them.
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Date: 2019-02-16 01:44 am (UTC)The clothes we got from cousins and the repairing clothes and having good clothes for nice things and the weird money hoarding thing I did. And the shower that leaks no matter how many times dad caulks it and all the farm junk and I have many memories of going to the local consignment shops for clothes. Our house has always been filled with stuff. We went to the library a lot. I had friends who lived in literal filth but it was fine. The nasty basement and the truly creepy hole crawlspace in it. The cold in the winter and sleeping on the floor by the woodstove on the coldest nights. The unfinished flooring still upstairs. the big fucking hole in the ceiling which is not a new plumbing problem. We spent so much time outside, playing with cousins and on the mountain and all that. Farm work. Getting mad at other kids who got an allowance for doing household chores.
And then I went to college and realized we were definitely not middle class by normal standards! And watching these commercials, I scratch my head. And living with Jade is also kinda part of it because she is so very middle class suburban and it is weird. And we had playdates at other friends houses when I was little and it was weird to be there and we never had playdates at our house.
My aunt and uncle bought a piece of our property and they had one of those two part houses mashed together and I thought it was the coolest thing! And they had air conditioning .
I think my mom also was a little horrified too because she grew up in the suburbs but it was definitely working class and her parents were working class folks whose parents immigrated and she has seven brothers and sisters and they lived in this weird little ranch house in new jersey. I think she tried to aim for middle class because I think a lot of her friends growing up were but boy did she lose on that one.
Our town (800 people ish) is kinda sorta getting a little revival, as much as it possibly could. A few families have moved in because it's cheap to live here and I think a lot of the folks with drug problems have either stopped or gone away. There's still no jobs really unless you drive to the city but that's not new and the only jobs are warehouse jobs.
I listen to a lot of podcasts and stuff and it's a fascinating view because so many of those people live in cities and I'm just. Fucking astounded at the shit they say. It's just mind blowing! I didn't know people really did stuff like go to the grocery store every day to buy food because the store is right there. Wild! Who even does that!
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Date: 2019-02-16 01:45 pm (UTC)Even at the farm, Annie still shops like that too, even though the Market 32 on Hoosic St. is ten minutes away at most, and Stewarts is within walking distance.
We had all hand-me-down clothes too, and I didn't learn how to buy clothes for myself until I was well out of college; the whole idea that you could choose clothes, entirely, instead of just wearing whatever you were given or found?? Nutty! So I still hoard clothing and can't stop. And I also hoard money all weirdly, the only reason I handle it at all well is that I just turned over all of it to Dude and he makes sure the bills get paid.
Since I went away to college Mom and Dad have had the time and money to nice-up the house I was born in so much-- the back porch that used to be a mudroom has a woodstove now, and nice linoleum and painted walls and insulated storm windows. The cracked linoleum in the kitchen is hardwood now with a tile entryway and tile backsplash behind the kitchen. The grubby wall-to-wall carpeting in the living room has been replaced with fairly expensive area rugs. There's no more unpainted drywall, or bare studs where we didn't get around to drywall yet; my old bedroom is no longer off an unheated hallway. It's suuuuuper middle-class now, because they had decent pensions and they're getting them now.
The basement is still incredibly creepy, though-- it floods in spring, and frogs live in the rock walls. The entire idea of a finished nice basement is totally foreign to me.