Exceptional - because you are
Too many hours spent in the neurologist and neuropsychologist's waiting rooms have taken the appeal off the word "exceptional." (About as delightful as "SHORT BUS - because you ride it!)

A favorite bumper sticker says, "Remember…you are unique. Just like everyone else." Everyone wants to have their absolute exceptionality recognized. If we say it pains us to admit that we are like everyone else, the facts say otherwise. Yesterday's Chicago Trib had another of those articles about the way everyone from the guys sleeping in refrigerator boxes on Lower Wacker to the scions of American industrial dynasties all consider themselves to be Middle Class.

Except for that childhood phase when I was sure that I was a British aristocrat trapped in the body of a Middle Class girl from suburban Milwaukee, I, too, have considered myself Middle Class. Yesterdays article was a little more probing, in that it gave figures. Nasty money figures that aristocrats Middle Class girls don't like to mention. Depressing. It must be natural to draw mental maps or Venn diagrams and place yourself right in the middle, defining everyone according to where they land compared to the center (i.e., you). That's where all the people in the article placed themselves. It can be depressing to lay one's diagram on top of someone else's.

Maybe I should just stop reading the Trib. I started the day as the Baroness von Huben and went home as Brandine Spuckler.