I’ll admit it. I have a problem with people who think they’re better than me, especially if it’s for stupid reasons, like not driving the right car or carrying the right handbag.
I get a lot of that on Long Island.
I know I shouldn’t care. I should hold my head high, confident that I have my priorities straight and my values in place. But time after time I run into women who assert their superiority with an arrogant sneer in my direction, and it makes me mad. Or sad. Sometimes it even makes me cry.
Is that pathetic or what?
The women we typically refer to as JAPS are notorious for this kind of attitude. You know the type—women so shallow they’re horrified to be seen talking to anyone who doesn’t ditch her entire wardrobe every season and start fresh. They’re miserably unhappy people with bad marriages and unfulfilling lives who try to fill the void with shopping and complaining.
I want to qualify all this by saying that I’m not entirely comfortable with the word JAP. First off, while I know that most folks understand it’s an acronym for Jewish American Princess, I worry that there are some who might misconstrue it as racist slang for a Japanese person. But also, it’s given a free pass to anti-Semites, who feel it’s benign enough to throw around with immunity. And that just gives me the willies.
So I feel like we need new a term for the privileged overclass on Long Island and elsewhere. Some are Jewish, but certainly not all. Perhaps we should call them PYMPELS, Privileged Yet Miserable People with Empty Lives. I’ll try to remember that the next time one of them tries to assert her superiority over me for wearing the wrong shoes, and maybe I won’t feel so bad.
After all, I’m not the type who cries over a PYMPEL … am I?
