I Confess

I have very little patience for snobbery in any form, having been on the receiving end of it too many times. Ex-boyfriends who gnashed their teeth over my preference for cheesy, swelling, Styx anthems over the more cerebral Pink Floyd or Frank Zappa. The friend in an elite MFA program who turned up her nose at my bookshelves full of modern literature, noting tersely the lack of obscure Chekhov dramas or Elizabethian poetry or whatever it was she was entranced with at the time. The couple across the table at a JCC dinner who very obviously lost interest in speaking with me once it was determined that I graduated from a lowly state university and was neither a doctor, lawyer, nor pampered stay-at-home mom with a nanny in tow. If people can't look beyond their prejudices and see that I have kick-ass taste in music and books and can easily match wits with any Stanford graduate despite my bargain-basement education, well, screw 'em.

That said, I too can be a terrible snob, mostly about ridiculous issues with no logic behind them whatsoever. For example, last night Chef and I were giggling over the latest For Better or For Worse strip which depicted Mike and Deanna trying to sleep in a crowded bed with both kids sprawled over them - a common scene in the Aimless household. "Hey, look at this," said Chef. "We MUST cut that strip out and put it on our refrigerator immediately!" And we laughed and laughed, because of our shared - and baseless - belief that people who cut out comic strips and put them on the refrigerator are fuzzy slipper-wearing, fluffy kitty poster-having loons. Same with most people who collect things. I mean, vintage records or books, okay. Antique jewelry or depression glass, maybe - if you don't get too carried away. Beanie Babies, Hummel figurines, Harmony Kingdom boxes, Longaberger baskets, Disney memorabilia, no. People who need an extra wing on their house to accomodate rooms full of Campbell's soup or Coca-Cola crap, just no.

I do try as best I can to keep these feelings hidden. I hope my good friends, a brilliant and refined couple with a beautifully decorated home, will never know that my esteem for them forever dropped a few notches after I learned that they regularly water down their Starbucks dark roast coffee with that awful flavored creamer that makes your drink taste like mocha almond or butter pecan. Ugh! I could see maybe using those if you were stuck drinking some cheap swill from a truck stop and needed to mask the taste, but tossing that gunk in your good quality, $3 cup of gourmet coffee? That's like going to Ruth's Chris, ordering the prime filet, and then dumping ketchup all over it.

Likewise, my virtual friends from various forums and message boards do not really need to know that I take their posting less and less seriously with each blinking, animated emoticon they employ - and they get extra points taken off for every use of "LOL" or "OMG!!!!!"

I'm actually much better than I used to be. For the longest time, I prided myself on being one of the select few who were above the frenzy known as American Idol. I smiled indulgently when my co-workers tried to talk to me about the contestants, shrugging apologetically and explaining "I just don't really watch that show." In truth, the only reason I had never seen it was that it came on right around the time that I usually give the kids a bath and get them ready for bed. But I liked to pretend that it was because I was busy with bigger, more important pursuits (like, say, reading all about the show in Entertainment Weekly).

Then one day my friend called me to say that I HAD to turn the TV on to see these kids butchering Elton John tunes. So I watched that episode, and naturally I had to tune in the next night to see who got voted off. That's all it took - for the rest of the season I was hooked. I arranged my schedule around Tuesday and Wednesday nights and logged onto the internet immediately after each show to review the commentary from fans. I angrily demanded a recount when Diana got more votes than Fantasia, and I cried racism when LaToya got voted off rather than the clearly inferior Jasmine.

I discovered that it was actually a lot of fun to know what everyone in the country was buzzing about, and to finally be able to participate in the many conversations in which the topic arose. And as an added bonus, one of my all-time favorite performers appeared on the show! Yes, I am speaking of Barry Manilow.

So much for being a snob.