My Car
Her Car
A couple of weeks ago I had an experience with a woman I know that I immediately posted about on Facebook. The incident involved her basically telling me that I should be embarrassed by the make and model of my car since she knew I could afford a better one (???). I know what you’re thinking – as an environmentalist I SHOULD be embarrassed by my car. It’s a giant Saturn Outlook that seats 7, plus 1 dog, and several bikes. It’s also a very ugly brown. However, it DOES have the best mph in its class (27-28 highway and 23 city), can get up my driveway in winter, hauls kids, dogs, bikes, and boats, and takes the associated beating fairly well. Moreover, it only has 70 thousand miles on it, so regardless of its shortcomings, it’s going to be my car for at least the next few years.
Anyway, she wasn’t interested in the sustainability of my vehicle, only in the status (or lack thereof) that it conveyed (she gestured to her giant white Lexus? Cadillac? SUV as an example of a more appropriate choice). I think she meant to flatter me in acknowledging that she believed my social standing above that of my car, however, I was neither flattered nor amused. I left at a loss for words and promptly thought of about 400 witty, scathing comebacks that I vowed to post, with her name, on my blog.
Then life got in the way, and I got to thinking (funny how reflection over time often changes my course of action ;).
Morgan has struggled a lot with some mean kids at school, and she’s watched some friends deal with much worse. As a result, she’s starting to understand that there is a pecking order, and that she – like each of her peers - has some place within that order.
My job revolves around a sport in which adults are trying to find their place in a pecking order too. Many if not most athletes care deeply about what their competitors think about them and their capabilities. A lot of people come to sport as adults to precisely because they like the clear nature of competing, ranking, and quantifiable improvement in standing, clarity that is much harder to get as a parent, a spouse, an employee, etc.
I guess the bottom line as painful as the truth may be sometimes, we all want to know where we stand in relationship to our community. And if we perceive that standing not to be good enough, we can get downright obsessed with improving it.
Even if that means bullying someone weaker or less socially sophisticated to prove yourself to the popular kids. Or overtraining to try to quality for Kona. Or undercutting a co-worker. Or spending $70,000 more than you need to on a CAR.
A FREAKING CAR!!! When children are starving...oy.
Anyway, I’m as guilty as anyone. I don’t give much of a crap about popularity, athletic success (let’s face it…I mostly compete to release the pent up emotions that come from women in parking lots criticizing my vehicular choices), or financial status. But the first time I got a grade lower than an “A” (I remember it clearly…a “B-“ in Calculus 1 with Professor Rajapa Asthagiri), I went in the bathroom and threw up.
I wasn’t puking because I was devastated by the thought of not understanding the intricacies of integrals. I was puking because I COULD NOT BELIEVE that there were people in that class who had gotten “A”s…making them – potentially – smarter than me. I’d like to think that I’ve gotten beyond that – graduating from a college where I was clearly in the bottom 50% of student IQ definitely helped – but I’m still intellectually competitive to a fault.
I think Morgan is getting it all sorted out pretty well at school, and she’s helping some friends do the same along the way, and they are helping her. It’s my job to help athletes sort it out and be happy and proud of being the best athlete THEY can be, regardless of who else races against them. And from a human standpoint, I guess both help me to see how very sad it is when someone doesn’t get it figured out, and hinges their self-worth on things so meaningless as a cars, or clothes, or neighborhoods.
So I won’t call her out publicly. Privately was another matter…as a result I don’t think I’m going to get an invitation to join the country club this year.
I don’t think I’ll be puking the bathroom over that one….
;)
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1 comments:
Interestingly, I think there is a distinct difference between the athletic endurance pecking orders and social/work ones. I'm also not sure which one is more difficult to manage. Pecking orders are like ladders and endurance sports really only have two or three (depending on your perspective): overall, age group and gender. At the end of the race, you have an exact spot in all three. Your only real choices to change your position, if you desire, are to train more (volume or efficiency) or find a race that suits your skills better. This means it's very simple to understand, but very difficult to make changes.
On the other hand, there are as many social/work ladders as there are jobs/people. There are literally millions of social ladders. And fortunately, some of those ladders are horizontal, and have no spaces between rungs so every one fits on the same level. Finding a different position I. The pecking order is as simple as finding a new ladder. Unfortunately, it's a but harder in practice than that. Often people pick the wrong ladders to work up, and the different ladders often seem to try and invalidate the value of other ladders.
Actually, as I write this, I'm starting to think that The ladder analogy for social and work is actually completely wrong, except that's how society mostly sees it. A true analogy is a molecular structure, where each part of the group has value in making up the whole, there is a dynamic relationship between all the parts, changing one part completely changes the entire structure, sometime making it stronger, sometimes weaker. We need to seek relationships where all the bonds are strong, here the combination of the parts makes the whole stronger, and where neighboring members fill and complement in the gaps in other.
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