<p>Teehee, UChicago8810. I was overgeneralizing intentionally. I have a good number of friends who care about their appearance more than I do-- I set the bar pretty low (it is clean? does it have obvious wrinkles in it?)-- and most people I know here do make an attempt to look decent, and not in a way that I find condescending in the slightest.</p>
<p>My general point is that I find it easier to like people who are like myself than I find liking people who are unlike myself, at least at first blush. This is not to say that my sets of friends are better than your sets of friends-- if anything, I think it’s just indicative of human nature and the role of personal experience in navigating the world. In a past life, I’ve been made to feel uncomfortable by the items of clothing my parents refused to buy for me, so I think I still carry those feelings around with me. And believe me-- I’m not particularly proud of the fact that while my friend group extends pretty broadly, my closest friends and I have remarkable similarities-- down to the fact that a bunch of our parents attended the same graduate school at the same time.</p>
<p>But my broader point is that it’s very easy to write folks off for a variety of reasons, and while I think we all do it, we should make a concerted effort not to do it, to the best of our abilities.</p>
<p>Gah, I can’t help myself from sounding like a Barney episode here, but when I interpret a comment (one not that uncommon on CC) to say something like, “All of the kids at School X suck for Y and Z reasons,” I can only think to myself: really? Is it that THEY all suck, or…</p>