American Poor

You know that moment when you realize that you have exactly $100 left in your bank account, you have no health care, you have no savings, you're a month behind all your bills, you're thousands of dollars in debt to your credit cards, and your weariness is a thousand layers thick?

THAT MOMENT SUCKS LIKE HELL.

What can you say to someone who has arrived at this moment? I don't know. I really don't know. The best advice I can give to you, (who may encounter such a person), is that there are some things better left unsaid. Such as:

• At least you don't have terminal cancer and six kids and no partner or teeth.

• Well thank goodness you've stored up all that fat because you could live off of that for quite some time.

• At least you have each other.

• But aren't you glad you're not pregnant. (duh)

• Isn't it wonderful how adversity can show us our strengths and make us shine like sweet little monkeys?

• I would like to introduce you to my friend...Jesus Christ...

• At least you aren't dead. (not a smart comment to make to a previously suicidal person)

• Aren't you grateful that a mountain lion has never ripped your face off your head?

• What are you complaining about?

• You're not poor until you're "Angela's Ashes" poor.

• Can't you just sell some more stuff? (SMACK GOES YOUR HEAD!)

• Maybe you wouldn't be so poor if you had faith in our creator just a teensy bit more. (yeah, because religious people are NEVER poor)

• Your life is like a beautiful film in which a family has to almost die before they get rescued by a rich uncle.

• Don't complain until you have only five dollars left.

• Wanna go shopping for shoes?

• Money can't make you happy anyway.

• I will eat all your frogs and then you'll see what it's really like to be bummed out!

Aha, I have hit upon a pleasantry that just might not piss me someone off who finds themselves at this moment in their lives that many of us have been in at some point in time or will be in eventually:

Random helpful commiserating commenter:
It's a little like having the hounds of hell nipping at your heels one thousand four hundred and forty minutes of every day, isn't it?

Person in bad situation:
Why, yes it is. It's exactly like that.

Random helpful commiserating commenter:
In fact, it's a lot like dying of exsanguination all alone in a field of itchy tall grasses full of ticks, wouldn't you say?

Person in bad situation:

You hit it right on the head with that one. But don't you think it's also a little like when you stub your toe and then it turns green and falls off and you realize that you can't become a foot model?

Hot! Hot! Hot!

another installment in a summer tale of avoiding debtor's prison

Don't you just want to eat some watermelon in this awful heat?! Well, don't rub it in if you are eating some, because it's not in season here yet so I can't buy any. In fact, if I stay true to my local eating challenge I just might not have any watermelon at all this year. They don't grow well around here.

I'll have to be satisfied gazing at my watermelon fabric instead. I just listed the above apron in my Etsy shop. I'm not sewing again, I already had this and figured I may as well list it. As I ironed it out I couldn't help but feel refreshed looking at those luscious wedges of red and green fruit. This is one of the things aprons can do for us, give us a little perk when we're wilted.

I call it better living through fabric and I know the vast majority of my blog friends wouldn't argue with me on this one. It's why we buy fabric that makes us giddy even when we don't specifically need it. We know that one day we'll be feeling blue so we'll look listlessly through our fabric stashes and when we come across that piece of fabric again it will light us up from the inside out.

If your fabric stash isn't making you happy then it may be time to liquidate it.

I heard that collective gasp.

RELAX.

I have a couple of Etsy orders to get out today and I want to say a special THANK YOU to Diane of Kentucky for her large order of fabric! While Etsy certainly isn't paying many bills at this point in time the extra money I have made from selling fabric there has been easing our very tough financial situation. In order to fix our situation we are going to have to do some very stringent budgeting.

I don't even know how people do that. I am not exactly a spendthrift but just as I started to mentally work out a possible budget I realized that most of Max's pants are either too small and/or are ripping out at the knees. I know I can patch a couple of holes and that's not a bad idea...but you can't make a pair of pants that are too small get magically big enough. I have to spend some money to clothe my kid. Luckily I just bought lots of new things for myself for my Scotland trip because I was really in need of some basics like socks so I should be set for quite a while. Whatever I find I need in the near future I can sew.

Sewing for a boy is not an easy prospect. Unless you want him looking like some freak from a cave. Boys clothes I don't do. Never have. I don't do all those crazy zip flies and to even locate the appropriate fabric is mission impossible. (My kid, as you might have guessed, doesn't wear jeans. He's picky about the fabrics he'll wear. It's a tactile issue.)

The trick we face now is to whittle away at our impressive credit card debt without earning ourselves bad credit in the process. We've had A+ credit for years now in spite of all our troubles and it would be nice to keep it. On the other hand, I'm not sure we'll be able to accomplish this feat without some damage to it. Everyone says to avoid debt consolidators like the plague but that may end up being our only option unless we can somehow make enough money to cover all our monthly needs AND make payments on our credit cards. We've always managed before, but we haven't always had a kid to clothe and feed. We've always paid our debt down to nothing and we've been proud of that.

But these are tough times and until I land another part time job or some fabulous book deal, we are still on very shaky ground. I'm not letting myself be scared today. Even though the creditors are literally calling us. They didn't used to do that. In fact, when we first had one of our credit cards we would constantly get invitations to not pay our minimum payment without penalty. Now if we're late paying by a few days they call us to ask for payment.

A friend of mine who is an investment broker was trying to convince me that we're not only not in a recession but that our economy is still healthy which is proved (apparently) by the profit reports filed by public companies in our country. I say that a great way to find out how healthy an economy is is to try to find a basic job in it. I say how healthy it is can be seen by how quickly your credit card company hunts you down when your payment hasn't arrived on time. Fear itself isn't an indication. Shit, you can just say "The plague has come back!" and half the country will rush to their doctor's office immediately and get whatever shots they're told they need, and they'll believe they need them even if all indications point to the opposite conclusion. However, the only reason credit card companies hound people for payment is if they've been getting hosed.

The truth is that if you've tried to refinance your home and within one week a number of lending institutions have suddenly gone belly up...that's not a good sign.

So my thoughts are turning towards budgeting and I'm not especially distressed by it. I don't love being in the very precarious position we're in. But having gotten a part time job that I can really enjoy and look forward to is a huge step in the direction of fixing our situation. I am feeling lucky again. Haven't felt lucky in a long time.

I'm going to view this challenge of getting out of debt and danger of losing everything as a kind of strategy game. Hopefully at the end of the game we'll still have our house, our good credit, and will learn to live within a small means. I should think of myself as a modern day Jane Austen character. One of the penny pinching poor but genteel relations of richer folk. Middle class people in reduced circumstances.

I am also considering selling my scooter. I'm not sure I could get enough for it to make it worth while but it is in great condition and Vespas do hold their value well. It's worth considering. Without the Vespa around I would not be able to run errands on it which means I'd have to solely rely on my bicycle which means I would get more fit. It would make me sad to have to sell it but at the same time, it's only a vehicle. Right? It's only a thing. A luxury.

I don't know all the answers but at least I have a sense of adventure about my still gloomy financial situation. I am the porky but (hopefully) lovable heroine in an early nineteenth century setting trying to avoid debtor's prison. Let's see where it all leads.

Looking Back

Is that a squash in your patch or are you just happy to see me?
(That turned out to sound dirtier than I intended.)

The last time we were this poor was when we lived in our Sutter Street apartment in San Francisco. I was pretty thin and stylish back then, but not on meds and must admit to having been a pretty moody chain-smoking gin swilling writer type. Yes, I was writing all the time; very serious work like poetry. I was submitting work to publications and had a very well highlighted-bookmarked-dogeared copy of "Poetry Market". I'm not sure how we ever afforded gin but I suppose part of it was due to the fact that we ate a lot of potatoes.

Anyway, I remember looking out of our window from which I could see the city lights flicker on in the early evening, while typing very important works of creative nonfiction (I didn't know that that's what it was called back then). I remember thinking how amazing it would be to own a shop and a house. It's the same common fantasy that almost everyone has. You're either dreaming of having your own little shop or you're dreaming of starting your own quaint bed and breakfast. I would ask myself why I bothered writing because I was never going to be published anyway, why not start a little shop and be cool shop owners?

I also imagined how it would feel to live in a house without cockroaches and mice and not be surrounded by people we didn't know and were reasonably certain we didn't want to know judging by the noises coming from the adjoining walls. All of these fantasies seemed so impossible then. It's great stuff to chat about at the pub over Guinness. We are great dreamers. We are colorful people.

Back then, fourteen and a half centuries years ago, we had everything to work towards. We were two bundles of pure unrealized potential. Philip wanted to be the next Disney. He said this to me one day while we were lying in bed imagining what our future might look like. I remember being a little surprised since he knew NOTHING about computer art. He was a fine artist. It's amazing to remember these times because it illustrates how far we have come. Although Philip has yet to become the next Disney (and I think he's changed course a little since then) he taught himself all the things he needed to know in order to land himself the kind of jobs that could teach him the rest.

I never did get published. Bukowski kept getting published in all the poetry zines I was trying to get into. Damn him. It's possible, I will admit, that that's because he was a better poet than I will ever be. I ended up publishing my own little zine. One printing, one issue. I made fifty of them and it was all typed by me, illustrated by me, copied at Kinko's by me, and handed out to all kinds of unwitting victims, by me. I included a little index card with a postage stamp on it in each copy asking the readers to please send me their critiques, their thoughts, and their opinions about my little publication. I called my printing company "Soapbox".

What young hopefuls we were. We never would have made enough money to save up to buy a house. We bought a house by benefiting from my family's tendency to fall out with each other. My Grandfather, without meaning to, made it possible for us to buy our first home. Because we did so well with our home choices we were able to fund the store adventure with proceeds from our last house. But still, not without going into debt, because of decisions made blindly.

So here we are. We still have equity in the house, though whether anyone will refinance it for us to help us out of this mess is questionable. Yesterday I felt like we had landed right where we were fourteen years ago. Just starting out. I mean, Philip is once again earning what he was way back then. As though he never had a job that paid him almost $80,000 a year. I have been frozen in time by staying home all these years. I never did earn more than $10 per hour and it seems that most of what I'm qualified to do will earn me $8.00. You can't blame me for feeling like we've had all our progress erased.

But if I'm going to be honest here, which I try to do, I have to admit that there are a lot of material differences between now and then. We do still, for now, own our home. That's an asset we didn't have back then. If need be, we can sell it and go back to renting. I can't tell you how desperately I want to avoid that, but at least we have that to fall back on. We had no assets fourteen years ago. I said I still haven't been published, and that's not really true. No, no one has gotten excited about my fiction or my poetry, because that's not what I'm particularly good at writing. But I've been publishing this blog for a year and can't deny that some people have become regular readers. That's not nothing.

But in addition to that, there's my little spot in the apron book coming out in the future. Even though it doesn't pay much, it's quite an honor and it was super fun to participate. I'll always have that to be happy about. Plus, that's more legitimate than self publishing. You know it is. To get picked out of a bunch of talent to be included in someone else's project is more impressive than to write a blog every single day and press "publish" with your pinkie.

Philip may be earning what he was fourteen years ago, but he's working with a very cool company with the potential to earn much more in the future. That's something he didn't have all those years ago. Not only that, he got an illustration published in one of his favorite bicycle magazines. So he's been published too.

We also have a kid. In spite of the fact that I don't think I'm a particularly good mom, I do my very best with it. I can't exactly change who I am for my kid's sake. I'm never going to be a woman who is really jazzed by caring for children. I love my kid. I love that we are a family. But I don't sit around feeling deep satisfaction with motherhood. I feel like it's the trickiest hardest thing I've ever chosen to do. The biggest difference having a child makes on revisiting this whole poor gig is that now I have to worry about providing for an extra person. It makes it much more emotional.

You know what I love about my kid though? He's a real sweetie sometimes. I have tried to keep our troubles from Max over the years because children shouldn't have to worry about the same things their parents are worried about. So I try not to cry in front of him. I failed miserably yesterday. Mostly he didn't notice because he was on the play station all day long, but near the end he saw me crying and heard me telling Philip what our options were and he came up to me and said:

"Mama, you can have all my money if you want. I have a lot of money saved. I have hundreds of pennies. You can have it all mama."

Jesus, it's in moments like that when you really get to enjoy the innate sweetness of children. Mine is as delicious as they come.

A Whole Lot Of Random

(plus frightening hair details)

I've got a whole lot on my mind so I'll just spit it all out as it comes to me, in no particular order.

I keep meaning to tell someone about the most fully realized, most hideous mullet that I have ever had the horror to witness...so I'll just tell you. (Whoever you are today.) I was at the video store totally minding my own lousy business getting more episodes of Alias* when I almost ran into a youth of approximately fourteen years of age who had the fluffiest red hair** I have ever seen.

I thought it was just a really nasty case of bed head from the front the way it was sticking up all over the place in over-grown tufts, but then he turned around and it was all I could do to keep myself from shrieking in pain at the sight of his long locks trailing down his back. Oh god, it's kind of painful to remember. I knew I needed to tell someone because I've been holding it in for days and I'll be heading to the store on my scooter, trying really hard not to exceed the speed limit when suddenly I see it in my mind's eye and it's just as shocking as the first time and I swerve in my lane like a drunken starlet.

And the worst part is? At that age, kids are no longer getting the haircuts their parents want for them, so that means this kid is actually a part of the nation-wide effort to bring the mullet back into mainstream style. Just because Scarlet Johanson likes (and has had) mullets, doesn't mean they're a good idea. Scarlett Johansson is not Diana Vreeland.

I finally got a chance to sit down to my new Elle this morning and read a little mini interview of Karl Lagerfeld. I've done this before and it's always a mistake. ALWAYS. I inevitably end up having the intense desire to smack him around a bit. He's such a pompous ass-hole. He thinks his blood is filled with the sharpest wit and that we are all just going to swoon from his coolness. Jesus Christ, take those glasses off and have a look around you: is anyone trying to look like you or be just like you? No. Why? Because it's not cool to be a pompous ass anymore. Incidentally, Karl isn't Diana Vreeland either, but I'm not sure he's aware of that.

Lindsay Lohan was on the cover AGAIN. I read an interview with her where she said that she wants to be a "sex symbol" just like Marilyn Monroe. You know what's super sad about that? All Marilyn Monroe wanted to be was a serious actress. It would classy of Lindsay to fall out of the public eye for a few years, take some serious acting classes, do some gritty theater and then resurface with the intention of making something worthy of herself rather than modeling herself after tragic public figures.

If she wants to be like Marilyn Monroe she has about ten years to go before combusting.

It's been a long time since I have been required to really examine the price differences between different types of onions and choose the cheapest ones. It's weird to really have to count pennies. So many people have to do it and it's not like I've been rich or anything, but it's been a long time since we've been this poor.

We were really poor for a long time and then Philip got a good job, right about the time in life that one should be getting a good job, and though we were hardly swimming in riches, I stopped having to compare the price per ounce between cheeses. I could pretty much buy the groceries that I wanted to, good quality groceries. When our financial picture changed the very first luxury for us was in what we spent on our groceries and what kind of groceries we bought.

We went from living off of ten pound bags of russet potatoes to buying new potatoes which are much more expensive per pound. We went from buying cheap canola oil to buying decent olive oils. I would buy nice produce from places that took a great amount of care over the produce they were selling. We bought better coffee. We bought things like kalamata olives and croutons.

We bought nice alcohol. Lots of nice alcohol.

I really don't know how we're going to get out of our current financial mess but I do know that I now must make every penny count when I shop.

It's so much easier being poor when you don't have children. I keep thinking I'll have to give up renting movies for us and Max. Then I think "well, I can give up movies for me, but still get them for Max". But I know that even that is a luxury now. Renting movies. There are millions of kids out there who don't get to rent movies or have any new toys for their birthdays, kids who barely have enough to eat. I am aware of this.

But you know what? Just because they're going without the fun things in life doesn't mean they're alright, it doesn't make them superior. Do you think the parents of children who are living with minimal stuff are happy to tell their kids they can't go to the latest movie or even rent it? No. No parent wants to take all the fun extras out of their kid's life. A good quality of life doesn't require all kinds of money, but when you can't light your kid's face up with the little surprises that children love, the treats that they will remember when they are grown up, it makes your heart pretty heavy. I enjoy bringing fun movies home from the video store for Max almost as much as he enjoys getting them.

We're not necessarily there yet. Maybe things will smooth out. Maybe I'll start getting a lot more traffic and sales on my website. But as I was comparing the price between Walla Walla sweet onions, yellow onions, and white onions, these were the things I was thinking about.

That, and the nightmare mullet.

Plus, while I was at the gym*** doing leg exercises I kept noticing these three hairs I managed to miss with the razor. This always happens to me. I could spend an hour carefully shaving my legs (though I don't) and I would still always miss something. These aren't light fairy hairs either. They're long and dark and course. Very monkey-like. At least I didn't miss a whole strip this time. That's the worst. One strip of hairy monkey leg in a sea of smooth pasty-ass milky white skin. Kind of like leg side-burns.

It's kind of a good thing I don't go out in public all that often.



*Alias: so here's the scoop for Jungle Dream Pagoda; it's nothing like Buffy because there's no campiness. However, it is very unrealistic and engaging. I'm totally hooked even though the acting isn't all that great either. It's just one of those shows that can reel you in. The story is totally enjoyable. Plus, who wouldn't want to watch Michael Vartan in action? (I actually don't think he's very sexy, but there's certainly some kind of appeal I can't explain.)

**I don't like men with fluffy hair. Men with any type of hair that could be described as "leonine" should keep it short and in order. Older men with fluffy hair are especially alarming to me and I'm sure they aren't good for my heart.

***If our financial situation doesn't change then I will have to not renew my membership in two months. Do you think I could manage to go to the gym every single day until the end of my membership and lose sixty pounds? With beer not in the budget, isn't it possible? Oh man, we are going to be grumpy as hell this week.