(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=720540&forum_id=2#8926035)

Well, they'll pass you by,

Glory days,

In the wink of a young girl's eye, glory days,

Glory days...

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=720540&forum_id=2#8925598)

dudes with tats, bad rock and country classics on juke box. feeling that fight could break out any minutes. totally marginalized people - too dumb and too old to change.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=720540&forum_id=2#8925528)

this would get you knifed in my poortown

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=720540&forum_id=2#8925634)

But Killington in VT and some places in Maine are the best.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=720540&forum_id=2#8925594)

And maine is too far.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=720540&forum_id=2#8925632)

Poorness must be washed away by generations of quality. The first has the hardest cross to bear, in that they will have the money but know that they never will have the prestige of their fellows. Ultimately, the "P" tat on their foreheads will be with them until death.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=720540&forum_id=2#8931251)

I went there for Thanksgiving. I got ridiculed for using "made up words" when I used the word "fastidious."

Apparently, I looked like a "fag" in what I was wearing. I also heard the phrase, "People actually dress like *that*?!"

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=720540&forum_id=2#8930368)

*raises fist in solidarity*

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=720540&forum_id=2#8930843)

Sounds like your plan to impress the country folk backfired.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=720540&forum_id=2#8930847)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=720540&forum_id=2#9831213)

the professional classes (doctors, lawyers, school teachers) have abandoned the rural hamlets for suburbs. the poors that are left are uneducated, and angry.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=720540&forum_id=2#8930891)

1. nothing to do at all.

2. sometimes i put on my best face and go to bars, but noone really likes me, and often poors have started fights with me.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=720540&forum_id=2#8930922)

yes, - actually my mother. father is dead.

Post-school and don't have a job or you're switching jobs?

switching careers - looking for a short term gig in city to do in between attending a 16-30 LS. i lived in a major city after college, and then Socal and NYC. ran into a bind, and had to get out. came here - HUGE MISTAKE.

Do you have to put on work clothes to go the bars?

No, you don't have to put on work clothes, but you would be percieved if normal if you were wearing work clothes, and a "fag" or "prep" if you you weren't. I wear jeans and t-shirt, and decent wool coat, and this, somehow, is unacceptable.

Do poors even bother to dream up an excuse to start a fight or do they just antagonize for no reason?

some poors are nice. they understand you are not like them and they'll be really friend to you, and you can get some good convo. but always - you can bank on it - some poor is going to come up and ask if you are "faggit" or ask you "why you think you are cool" or something. often they will be interested in if you because you don't look the same. but real point is that there are lots of poors that are just really, really angry. its not uncommon for them to say that you are a "fag" or a "nigger lover" not sure where comes from. they have obsessions with black people and gay people. and when try drink it comes out for some reason.

you could fight the poor - but if it happens every time you go out for a drink, then you either don't got out or you get into a fight every time.

i've never seen such angry people, really.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=720540&forum_id=2#8930952)

Question: Why not just leave and spend the few months somewhere else, this doesn't sound tolerable

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=720540&forum_id=2#8930989)

i am trying to leave asap; i think i want to wait until admissions letters come in, then i can get going hopefully in may or so.

one thing, i've decided to do is look for contract work in major cities.

do you have any suggestions? lol. i am pwn3d!

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=720540&forum_id=2#8930994)

she can open the letters for you.

leave poortown, temp or do some contract work in a real city before you go to LS. If you're this miserable before 1L year, you're going to have a tough time of it.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=720540&forum_id=2#8931262)

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/countryboys/

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=720540&forum_id=2#9361745)

i see dudes like this every day.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=720540&forum_id=2#8930905)

http://bp1.blogger.com/_KnTc6423bxA/Run9dLXCBTI/AAAAAAAAAEE/55ln1IO1U8I/s1600/SteelersFans.jpg

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=720540&forum_id=2#10025983)

It's just that I dress a little differently than them and talk a little differently.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=720540&forum_id=2#8930995)

let me tell you a few things about poortown:

-poortown's laundromat is always busy after dinner, and it is a dank, depressing place with filthy water pooling around at least a couple of machines.

-men in poortown drive older manual trucks, and most of them have been modded to fit big swamper tires. a gun rack is obligatory. men who drive cars rather than trucks are immediately identified as faggots, unless the car is being used for street racing.

-men in poortown fight because even if you lose, it's manly to stand your ground and take your beating. fighting distinguishes fags from nonfags, because faggots cower from fights, while nonfags will fight when called upon to fight, even if there is no 'reason,' as such, to fight.

-tats are a near-mandatory way of showing your allegiance to the ethos of poortown. your tats will probably NOT be directly related to the town itself, but the fact that you have tats is important. it is today's tribal scarification. tatless men are goddamn faggots in the metaphysics of poortown.

-poortown never really scrubs off, no matter how hard you want it to scrub off. of course, those of us with intelligence, who escape poortown for better things, can hide our background from others. but poortown is branded to the soul. i am a male from poortown. i will never be anything else, no matter what else i become aside from that. but this is not a bad thing. it's simply my identity.

-at the same time, i am no longer OF my poortown. poortown is not like a metropolitan city that can be alienated then embraced again at will. a new yorker can leave NYC and come back to NYC and be a 'new yorker' again. this is not how poortown works.

poortown is a small, continuous, shared experience, and when you leave, it's like cutting your patch from poortown's quiltwork. poortowners continue living without you, updating each other daily on their doings, fucking each other, marrying, divorcing, having families. a year of absence may as well be a decade. once you pluck yourself from this continuity of poortown experience, you by necessity become an outsider, moreso as time goes on.

now, if you move back permanently, you will eventually get filled back in on the transpirings of those lost years. but poortown cannot be taken on and off like a jacket. you're either in it or you begin to become an outsider.

i hope this helps you understand, a bit, the psychology of poortown, which is where i grew up.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=720540&forum_id=2#8931062)

my particular poortown was in long-term decline. that means it used to have things, like a movie theater, that it no longer has. it has some restaurants, a couple gas stations, a school system with one high school of about 400 students, a grocery store, a handful of small industrial facilities, and a few poor people stores (pawn shop, check cashing place, secondhand store, used clothes shop). there are also some churches. nothing pretentious like a 'synagogue' or 'unitarian chapel.' nope. just regular protestant churches. people wish our town had a wal-mart, but there is none. you drive 15 miles down the road to the nearest wal-mart. and of course, we have about six bars.

there is little of interest to draw the outsider. sure, we have a local 'fair' that does a bit of statewide advertising, but no one from outside our poortown would really care to attend the meager festivities that are really just a local social occasion anyhow.

high school was, fundamentally, tremendous fun. however, i made a point of fitting in. i joined the football team and worked out and kept my studying to myself. i drank and smoked pot along with everyone else. no one at school ever saw me poring over joyce's short stories, or the latest issue of scientific american. my awareness of the social order was keen enough for me to hide these things. i got excellent grades, but i rarely volunteered answers in class. scholasticism is not a traditional value in poortown.

however, rifts became inevitable after people learned that i would be attending college hundreds of miles away and out of state. they realized at some level that i was not 'one of them' in certain foundational ways. i would not go cap-in-hand after graduation to the asphalt plant, wrangling for a job. many of my friends did. i would not be joining the military. i would not be renting a house with my senior year girlfriend and starting a family. i would not be drinking with the guys for long after graduation.

i was, at first, apologetic, as though leaving was a transgression. i apologized for not 'being there' anymore. one thing that poortowns do, as a result of their incestuous insularity, is develop a strong communitarianism whose rejection is felt by all as an insult. imagine the poortown as an organism of residents who were born nearby and who will probably die nearby. when that order is forcefully rejected through something like 'going far away to college,' the organism is aggrieved. after all, it RAISED you. and it raised you as a component. for a town in decline, losing its top students simply highlights what everyone already knows - the organism is slipping into necrosis. things are not healthy there.

and so those who remain become a community exclusive to you, because your values no longer sync up. don't mistake this for internal unity WITHIN the various castes of poortown - as has been pointed out, those who have real jobs with benefits are in quite a lot better shape than the unemployed. those in real houses are better off than those in the trailer parks. and there is real animosity between classes. but they are all poortowners who share the same poortowner DNA. they are familiar to one another.

something like college is a mutation. when i look at myself in relation to the poortown i left behind, i am a disfigured mutant. but the alternative is to stay eternally in poortown.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=720540&forum_id=2#8931224)

if we limit it to four-year college programs that end with traditional bachelor's degrees, then about 10%. if we limit it to colleges outside the local state system, then just me and a handful of other kids. it's really not common to do that.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=720540&forum_id=2#8931241)