Toil and trouble

I scored 62 on this “Do You Live in a Bubble?” quiz.

score

I knew my score would be fairly high because I grew up partially in poverty and partially in lower-working-class environs, and then joined the military as an enlistee.

But in many ways, I’m atypical. I’ve always been estranged from any community, never quite belonging. I was reading and fully comprehending college-age textbooks by the time I was in fourth grade. For example, I helped my neighbor Lori study for and pass her community college microbiology class before I’d even entered fifth grade, explaining to her in detail what DNA was and how it functioned, etc, among other things, even making her study cards for the class. I finished Moby Dick in third grade. I’d read literally entire shelves of the local library by the time I was 11 years old. You can guess how that went in a pretty anti-intellectual place.

So no bubble, but in many ways I’d never really had and never will have a home in any community — now as an adult I might know more and be able to reason more capably than someone with some fancy matriculation and degree to show for it, but I don’t really fit in with the college-grad crowd, either. Mostly they just make me angry.

So there is no larger froth into which my tiny vesicle embeds.

But I do get a bit choleric when the college-grad crowd shits on working-class and poor people, because that’s where and how I grew up and I understand that experience of life well even if I never completely fit there, either.

I’m not sure what larger meaning that quiz holds, but many of the people I’m around daily now would get a very low score on it, I do know that.