When I Grow Up

by Garbage from Version 2.0

Hello all again after a long blogging break. Been wanting to add an entry for a while but other things (mainly laziness) has gotten in the way. So what has been going on? Well, I switched teams at work and am doing much better than my bitterly enraged last entry described. A little change in scenery can do wonders. I now work on Gmail which is an interesting challenge. I was also in NYC again a while back for a major field study. Which sort of relates to the theme of this blog entry, which is how the way you grow up affects who you are. Because I have been reminded about it lately.

While in New York (aside from seeing the American Idiot musical and doing research), I inevitably got sick. I say it was inevitable because one cannot do that many field studies and go to that many homes and apartments and not pick up something. So I hardly got any sleep, was congested, and just plain miserable in my hotel room. So I called in sick to work and was fruitlessly trying to get some sleep until about noon time. When it dawned on me then I could actually take some medicine and feel better sooner. Why that didn't dawn on me sooner is partly because the way I grew up. When I was a kid, my mom never gave me any medicine, not even aspirin, when I got sick. Well part of that was that I had trouble swallowing pills. But all from grade school to high school, unless I was puking my guts out, I had to tough it out being sick. Meaning I would still go to school, and do everything I was supposed to do no matter how crummy I felt. That probably led to much more snot ending up in the pool when I had to go to swim practice even when I had colds and was congested like hell. Going into college, it was pretty much the same since I could afford to miss class or work so I would tough it through. Although in college, I did discover the miraculous healing powers of Nyquill. So now many years later, when I am fully capable of buying pretty much any medicine I want, I just didn't dawn on me to do so because my natural instinct was to tough it out.

Another reminder of how I grew up shapes who I am today when I was watching the Fab Five documentary on ESPN. As some of you may have heard, this documentary made headlines because Jalen Rose called Grant Hill an "uncle tom." Now I don't condone calling people "Uncle Toms" unless they actually are an uncle and their name is actually Tom (I don't condone drunk driving either), but I actually sympathized with Rose when I watched the documentary. Because I watched the full context in which he gave those comments. He said:

"Schools like Duke didn't recruit players like me. I felt that they only recruited black players that were Uncle Toms. ... I was jealous of Grant Hill. He came from a great black family. Congratulations. Your mom went to college and was roommates with Hillary Clinton. Your dad played in the NFL as a very well-spoken and successful man. I was upset and bitter that my mom had to bust her hump for 20-plus years. I was bitter that I had a professional athlete that was my father that I didn't know. I resented that, moreso than I resented him. I looked at it as they are who the world accepts and we are who the world hates."

I sympathized with Rose because I felt almost exactly how he felt when I was growing up. I grew up with a single mom, with a dad who didn't show a shred of interest in me. For the first several years, it didn't bother me because I went to the lower income schools with kids who were noticeably worse off than me. But then we moved to the more upper middle class neighborhood, where I quite noticeably stood out on the lower end. I remember in junior high, both my math and english teacher were criticizing two of my take home projects for not being as well polished and made as my other classmates. I wanted to tell them, but was too ashamed to admit, that my mom couldn't afford all the nice materials that my classmates had to make theirs. When I got to high school it got even worse (plus the normal teenage angst didn't help either). I saw their cars, houses, nicer clothes, private SAT and tutoring lessons, and most importantly, two parent families and grew bitter, and yes jealous.

I would try to bust my ass and they would always beat me in what seemed like everything. I resented that they had both parents, both incomes, and all the resources. It seemed like it wasn't fair to expect me to compete against them. For example, I got a 1320 on my SAT without taking a prep class. I should have felt great but compared to more well off classmates, I felt like a failure because they were getting 1500's or even close to perfect 1600's. What I didn't realize at the time, that those 1500 and 1600 scores were probably the result of expensive classes and tutoring. So my Mom paid $800 so I could take the Princeton Review SAT class, which was a lot of money that I knew we really couldn't be spending. So after I took the class, I improved to 1400, which is an excellent score by most measures, but I felt like a failure because I didn't get the 1500. My mom had sacrificed and splurged on the same thing the "elites" got, and I felt I blew my golden opportunity to make the most of it. And when my more well to do classmates got their acceptances to Ivy League schools, Stanford, Berkeley and I did not, well it just made me more envious and jealous.

This continued through college, although it wasn't so bad at De Anza, because it was a community college. It really flared up at Santa Clara when I transferred. If you go back to my old diaryland blog, then you can quite easily see my simmering resentment towards them. In high school, the more well off kids were at least taking advantage of their resources with academic success. At SCU, there seemed to be a bunch of spoiled brats whose parents paid their way, and they weren't even that smart. I relished every time I beat them on a test, got a higher grade in a class, or when I got interviews and internships they didn't. I raged at the perceived injustice every time they beat me at something as just another example of how society rewards the privileged elite to the disadvantage of the truly worthy (namely me). I remember I was one of the seven finalists for this prestigious (and well paying) internship at PriceWaterhouseCoopers. So there was this big group interview, and since I was paying my own way through college, I couldn't afford a suit. So I wore literally my only dress shirt, with my one of three ties, and Old Navy slacks. Compared to everyone else at the interview, I was the most low-rent out of all of them. And of course, when they didn't pick me I seethed it must have been because those other candidates had so much more money than I did, it wasn't fair. I have to say that it took me a long while to grow out of this resentment, jealousy, and envy. Looking back, those kids I was jealous and resentful of, in almost all cases (there were a handful of very glaring counter-examples) didn't deserve my scorn. It wasn't their fault that they came from families and backgrounds that afforded them advantages that I didn't have. And more than likely their parents worked very hard to provide their children with them so they wouldn't have to bust and break their asses like I did. And you can't blame their kids for maybe not being as driven as someone who has less than them because they always had the comfortable safety net under them. Hell, I made a vow that I would try my best to make sure that any of my nephew and my (potential) kids won't ever have to worry about a paying a cent for their college tuition.

But as they say, you can never really shake off completely how you grew up. Which is why I got really mad when I read Grant Hill's op-ed in response to Rose's comments. He is of course defensive and lashes out at Rose for saying that he is not a true black because his family was able to provide him a strong and comfortable upbringing. And that Duke shouldn't be criticized for recruiting players like him, and not Rose. I think if he actually understood Rose's comments, he should have understood Rose's legitimate gripe that he had to overcome so much more than Hill, yet Duke wouldn't even touch him and they recruited Hill instead, who had all advantages in his corner. The reason why I got so angry is that the "Hill defense" was trotted out against me plenty of times when I was growing up. Those colleges, companies, professors, teachers, recruiters or whoever or whatever was judging me, most of the time they had no idea that I didn't have as much money, resources, or advantages as the next guy who did but had the same or slightly better qualifications, performance, grades or whatever than me. And of course without that knowledge, they very often picked the other guy, and not me. Which when it happens to you over and over again, it pisses you off to no end. And on the rare times where I would confront the more privileged and advantaged person who got the something that I didn't get, they would inevitably say that their background (with their more resources, advantages, and privileges than me) had nothing to do with it and that they earned their whatever solely on their own merits. Which made me madder because it is complete bullshit. I felt (and with some, but nowhere near complete justification) the reason why they got the better score on that test, got that job, got the girl, or got the whatever was because I had to work 30-40 hours a week in addition to going to class and studying in order pay for college while they did not have to do that because their parents paid their way.

But like i said before, it has taken a long time (probably too long) to get past all that jealously, bitterness, and resentment. And maybe I never will completely get past all that. But one thing I will never forget is that as no matter how hard I have worked and taken advantage of opportunities presented to me, I will never call myself a self-made man. There are thousands upon thousands of dollars of federal and state grants, student loans, and scholarships that can testify to that. And while I didn't have the richest upbringing, I still had many things that many (in fact way too many) other children aren't fortunate to even come close to having. So I guess one of the biggest impacts of how I grew up is humility. Especially now, since there is no way of denying it, that I fall into that privileged and elite class of people I raged against when I was growing up. While $800 is not chump change for me, it wouldn't present me with any hardship to fork over that much for a class. Hell, I think I have spent almost that much spoiling my nephew with gifts and he is not even 6 months old. So yeah now that I have access to resources to give myself and the people I care about the advantages, resources, and opportunities that I wasn't able to get earlier, it does change my previous opinion and attitude towards them. But I don't deny that they make a difference. That's one thing I will never forget from my upbringing.

That's all for me now. Until next time, peace.