(no subject)

[conuly]

When we got to Chambers Street, we would be the first ones off the train and would skip every other step up. We would speed-walk down the block, checking the time impatiently when stopped by a red light and then jaywalking when the coast was clear.

We would part ways at Borough of Manhattan Community College, where he turned off while I hustled on to my high school nearby. We shared this routine for years, not exchanging a word or a nod even as we experienced the same frenzied commute.

There's only one high school that this person could have attended with the described commute, and that's Stuy. I don't get why people do this, but they do it all the time. Was there some schoolwide lecture that I missed where they reminded us all to always use the bridge rather than taking our lives into our hands crossing the street, and to speak to somebody if we were thinking of suicide, and to never flash our money around, and oh, to never tell anybody where we attended high school? I remember the first three, maybe I zoned out and didn't hear the rest of it?

At least this person didn't gratuitously toss the word "elite" in there.

Comments

[archersangel]

makes me think about how some people who went to harvard just say they went to university in cambridge.

[conuly]

LOL, yeah.

Like, mention where you went to high school or don't, but don't set up all the clues and then get coy about it.

[minoanmiss]

I went to Harvard and I am now going to tell you a joke.

We say that because we're hoping people will guess we went to MIT.

[conuly]

Surely that’ll never work.

[archersangel]

ha! love it.

[thekumquat]

I've heard of Stuy but don't know all the connotations. But assuming it has a reputation for wealthy elite pupils, I'm not surprised if people don't mention it, for two reasons:

One - the people who know, will know. You figured it out from the commute. Others who know the place would recognise the school location too. No need to actually name-drop.

Secondly, I assume mentioning it would result in the same reaction as when people deduce where I went to school, 'near Brighton'. "OMG! Did you go to ....?" "Wow, I can't believe I'd ever meet someone who went to ....!" "I'd never have thought you were the kind of person to go to ...!" "What was it really like?"

It gets really tedious, but also some people will treat me differently, in particular assuming I'm from a much wealthier background than I am. Some of the assumptions are true - a classmate had an affair with a prince, I have a Bacon number of 2 thanks to two different classmates, friends' dads controlled various countries, leading to the murder of other friends' dads and the exile of other families, I knew various drug dealers who controlled nightclubs... but it wasn't a hotbed of lesbian sex, at least not in my day. Though once Section 28 went away, some people admitted some had happened.

[conuly]

Wealthy if they're white, perhaps not if they're Asian. In any given year there's an average of zero (0) Black students, which is a periodic scandal.

(Though I suspect that part of that is that some Black students who would attend are being skimmed off by Prep for Prep or their parents are actively discouraging them from going there and instead sending them to Bard or Ice or somesuch. All the rest of it is systematic bullshit.)

This is the school in which my classmates told me that their parents weren't wealthy, they had a house in the Hamptons but not the good part of the Hamptons. I think of that at least once a year and wonder if they ever got a clue.

[thekumquat]

Ah yes. Like the classmates claiming that having a maid didn't mean their families were wealthy, "I live in Bangkok where everybody has maids!"

Someone retorted, "Do the maids have maids?"

Whoosh. Did not compute.

Being a boarding school, it was way more ethnically diverse than the UK. About half the pupils were expat brats, fees paid by oil companies, armed forces, government scholarships, etc, often overlapping with the 15% on scholarships, and people from at least 40 countries and living in even more, so in some ways it was very diverse, not to mention not excluding people for disabilities if you could cope with all the stairs.

I'm told the school was very good at helping apply for refugee status for those who needed it. They also had a full-time school psychiatrist, who was definitely needed!