Hot tub

Last night we had the Grad Christian Fellowship's women's retreat in New Glarus, which is a cute little fake Swiss town. I'm sure they had real Swiss immigrants back when it started in the 1850s, but now it's a tourist trap.

The two speakers were the Assistant Dean of Diversity and a sociology prof, who'd known each other for about two years professionally, but were each extremely surprised to find out that the other was Christian when we invited them to come and talk. Sociology and Asst. Dean of Diversity...go figure. I think in some fields - surprisingly, not the life sciences - announcing that you belong to an organized religion is like coming out of the closet.

The Chalet Landhaus is really nice but also awfully expensive, which is why the women's retreat is in February (off-season). But it's made of wood, has well-heated rooms, etc., plus a Jacuzzi. Someone commented that "if I had one of these in my house, I would be so relaxed." Well, there's a reason we don't have Jacuzzis in our houses:

Grad students aren't supposed to relax.

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One thing that Dr Turley mentioned was that she'd grown up poor (as had Dr Sanchez) and she'd been taught to hate rich people. (Look at the 5th item on her publication list, by the way.) I definitely didn't grow up poor, but our family was more or less lower-middle-class, and I wasn't taught to hate rich people but to look down on them - not explicitly, obviously, as my dad's a pastor, but you pick up on comments about spoilt kids, corrupt politicians, pampered housewives, nepotism, etc.

It drove me nuts to hear my Bengali friend, whose family in Dhaka had servants and drivers, insist that they weren't rich. It drives me nuts to hear my boyfriend, whose family has 4 cars total and whose parents own their own very nice house, insist that they're not rich. Not by relative neighbourhood or USA standards, maybe, but by the standards I grew up with they look like close to millionaires.

It's becoming very uncomfortable to me to realize that with the level of education I'm going to end up with, and the type of job that I'm probably going to have, I will be joining the ranks of the "rich people". I don't want to have to deal with investments and stocks and all that bullshit, and if there are any children in my future, I have an absolute horror of them growing up to be privileged brats. Maybe I can pull a John Wesley and give most of it away to continue living at the frugal-but-far-from-desperate lower-middle-class level that I'm used to.

Steve won't like it though. He wants his own aeroplane. We'll have to hash something out.