How I ended up the person I am today

For an American, I take an unhealthy interest in class. This, like so much else in my life, I blame on my mother. Rules were never much of an issue in our house, but behaviors that deviated from the upper-middle-class paradigm were verboten. What follows are some thoughts on the subject of social class, handed down in my family from generation to generation:

Household Furnishings & Decoration
• The well-bred own no more than one television, which should be tiny and hidden in a far-flung corner of the house. Extra points if you don’t have cable or color TV.

• Books should be well-worn and scattered liberally throughout the home. Extra points for James Joyce and foreign-language books.

• Objects you won’t find in an upper-middle-class house: fake fruit, plastic slipcovers, oak-veneered home entertainment centers, bed skirts, John Grisham novels, framed photographs of Ronald Reagan.

Personal Appearance
• It’s vulgar to be too well put together. Fake nails, fussy hairstyles, and designer clothes are the domain of parvenus. An element of shabbiness in personal appearance denotes refinement.

• Upper-middle-class men don’t wear jewelry. Upper-middle-class women wear only small, understated jewelry; a 5-karat diamond is terribly nouveau.

Child Rearing
• Manners are of little value to upper-middle-class parents, whose focus is on cultivating their children’s self-expression – out-and-out rudeness isn’t tolerated, but eating spaghetti with one’s fingers is.

• Corporal punishment is for the poor. Middle-class parents generally discipline through the cunning use of time-outs, and the rich don’t discipline at all. They’re far too busy and important.

Comestibles
• Foods you won’t find in an upper-middle-class kitchen: chicken nuggets, canned vegetables, pasteurized cheese product, tater tots, grape jelly, white zinfandel, bologna, infant formula.

• Foods you will absolutely find in an upper-middle-class kitchen: organic broccoli, free range Cornish game hens, aged balsamic vinegar, fair trade coffee. Also some assortment of dairy/gluten/egg/meat/soy/peanut-free products – food sensitivities are big right now.

• The upper-middle-diet is, above all else, inconvenient. I went with veganism, but fruitarianism, raw foodism, the cave man diet, and macrobiotics are even better.

Linguistics
• The New Yorker who says “idear” obviously comes from a blue collar background, as does the Michigander who says “melk.” If you’re upper-middle-class and under the age of 40, your speech isn’t so provincial as to betray your place of birth.

• To use the word “see” when you really mean “give” is lower-middle-class at best. For example, if at dinner you ask to “see” the peas, you’re most likely dining in a trailer.