Louis: WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU EATING NOW

Me and Severus: It’s instant ramen.

Louis: WHY DO YOU NOT EAT REAL FOOD

Severus: We are but mere peasants

Me:

Being poor is isolating and dehumanising. People expect to take any kind of work, no matter how unfit for it you are. You’re not allowed to have a choice, and you’re not allowed to have dignity. You’re supposed to grovel, take what you can out of desperation, and suffer. Being poor isn’t only a punishment within itself, but it’s something you’re perpetually punished for.

often times I wonder if I will ever be more then a trailer park hippy Its not lke i hate being that person but Ive been in trailers and apartments and hotels for so long bro oh my god i just wanna spread my wings out in a large living room , roll on the carpets without hitting the wall , dance in my kitchen and not fear the downstairs neighbor and sit in MY backyard. I dont want two stories I dont want eight tvs I dont need a pool but it would be nice, I just want to feel my body take up more space than this. I deserve more space than this. I deserve more then my lifelong possessions stuffed in three garbage bags and a sardine can to move my body in and a bed without a busted headboard . No more twin sized mattress .

people outside of poverty dont realize Its not just the money this shit rotted my family out you know youre always missing something but you just have to make do so much stuff flys under the radar here because everybody has their mind on survival we don’t pay attention to the evil that inflicts us and that we inflict on each other through our fears and anger and the tortures of yesteryear then one day you’ve got extra money saved and all the bills are paid and you remember everything that has happened that maybe wouldn’t have if someone decades back had a little more guidance or knowledge or if actions had any sort of consequence if work put in had a real pay off or if anyone had empathy or if anyone outside of our trailer parks and corner stores wanted to truly know us

I have a solution

I’ll make you know me

I’m only (almost) 31 and I feel like my body is used up from hard labor and I haven’t done any of it for myself.

at the food bank again (yes, I dinally learned that it’s called “food bank” in english)

Today at the food bank, a guy came up to me and started chatting. It was pretty clear he needed someone to talk to.

He started telling me about his taxi business that went bankrupt during the pandemic. One thing that he said really stuck with me. He told me he used to look down on people getting aid by the state if they looked physically able to work but no that he’s in the same spot he understands. He was one of the people thinking you could become a millionaire just by working hard but now he knows that everyone is closer to living off state support than being rich and that he wished he wouldn’t have had to learn it this way but that it has really opened his eyes.

I think that’s a lesson everyone needs to learn. Everyone is closer to living off state support than living like the billionaires they defend.

So be kind to people. Help if and where you can. We’re all just playing the cards we’ve been dealt and the game is rigged.

Well. I’ve been trying to get out of Cowtown for years. I’ve been trapped here for over a decade.

I got the call today that after being on the waitlist for over a year and doing SO much work to get papers in that I’m approved for a low income apartment in the big city. This is great! But…

The rent they’re planning to charge is over half my monthly income. And before I can even think about moving in I have to make $1300 minimum appear just to pay rent where I live now and first month’s rent with a deposit for the new place. This wouldn’t cover anything like renting a Uhaul or getting people to help me move or any transfer fees.

I have $6 in savings.

I’m considering starting a GoFundMe to try and raise the money to move with but I don’t know if it’s even worth trying right now. Everyone is in such dire straits these days. I might be able to get that rent price talked down on Wednesday but I don’t have much faith in that. Maybe I could survive a year with rent so high if I knew things might get better…

I don’t know. I really want this. I’m dying in this damn town. I have needed out for years. And I finally have a chance… only to have it taken away by an amount of money that is nothing to most people.

I don’t know what to do. Is it worth it to even try raising that money in a time like this? Do I just give up and hope that maybe next year something will go my way?

One more thing…

When I was growing up on foodstamps and charity, whenever we got a little bit of money, we pretty much always ran out and got McDonalds or doughnuts. Why did we do this? Why didn’t my mom make better, healthier choices?

I don’t know. Maybe she wanted her kids to feel normal and have something we saw all the other kids have. Maybe she was just extraordinarily tired from being disabled and physically and mentally overextended, and didn’t have the energy to put together and implement a super healthy menu. Maybe she was very mentally ill and made choices based on her own unique logic that I never understood. Maybe a little treat was a really effective form of escape, however short lived.

I don’t know all her reasons, but I know that I was there, and I didn’t starve to death. So, no, I’m never going to argue against people having SNAP benefits based on judging that some people might not use it the way I think they should, because without it, children starve.

Why do I hate Capitalism? Here is a vent post from my friend Lynnaquinn.

Here is the text for alt readers….
“Fuck….@everyone just to let you know, we were able to take a loan out to cover the bills coming out for the next three days….but it is a bit predator.

It was a $300 loan that gave us $285 and is charging us $85 a month for 8 months (it’s a 311% apt) it’s so fucking annoying cause they originally offered Naz $3500 but then reduced it to 2k then reduced to $300 at the very end of the process….

But we desperately needed it…a $44 bill came out today, I owe CashApp $157 with weekly payments until the last week of November (starting tomorrow,) and then the $76 coming out in a few days……it didn’t even fucking cover our over due internet bill…let alone storage or phone or groceries…..

This is one that before it goes too long we are definitely going to have to pay off….like it will be part of our raising definitely

Sorry, I had to rant about this….fuck poverty….fuck capitalism…..fuck predatory loan companies feeding off the desperation of those in need….fuck me for even thinking I could come up with even a fucking temporary answer that doesn’t just fuck us in the end…..seriously fuck life I guess…..I can’t….I just fucking can’t….this world is just fucking us hard one time after another after another….all for a fucking profit and I’m just sitting here….unable to fucking switch my brain off….just fucking ourselves further with any possible solution or relying on fucking others…..sorry…..I really had to rant….

@everyone sorry for all the pings…..but we are cancelling the predatory loan cause they keep on hanging up when we try to change the phone number they are trying to fucking use so we can’t get into the account…so we are using the phone thing to cancel it now….which means our bank probably is going to go heavily in the negative the next few days 🙁”

I feel like there’s a misconception that once people have SNAP, they’re home free and have everything they need. When I say, “Yeah, my family was on food stamps,” people say, “Oh, good thing you didn’t go hungry.

But actually I went hungry quite a lot. Food stamps and food drives helped my family not die of starvation. It didn’t keep us from never going to bed hungry. Sometimes the free lunch I got at school was all the food I would have that day. Sometimes every meal outside of school was canned pork and beans. One summer, we recieved a wealth of spaghetti noodles and tomato sauce in a box, and that’s just all we ate all summer, and that is not hyperbole. I got so sick from malnurishment (and not knowing I was gluten intolerant.)

And it didn’t save us money to pay bills, because without it we would have just not had food. We never had electricity or water or anything turned off, but we also couldn’t afford to turn up the heat in winter, so I just wore a winter coat inside on cold days, and slept under layers upon layers of blankets.

I’m just saying, people need SNAP. And then they need more. Not only do people need to not have things taken away, they need much, much more.

Things I learned at my local food-aid:

• instructions for how such systems work should always be printed out in multiple languages. every single time someone doesn’t understand the rules. and every single times the volunteer at the front has to yell out “can anybody speak arabic?” or “can anybody speak ukrainian?” And some people stay there the entire time even though they already got their food, just because they were asked to translate. I think that’s not a good way to handle this and sadly a lot of institutions handle language barriers like that.
• it doesn’t matter if you work as a volunteer for an objectively good cause, people will hatd you, because they don’t learn to place their frustration on the system so they have to take it out on people. similar to any kind of retail or restaurant tbh. If there are no bananas left but someone really wants bananas, they’ll be impossible to reason with and complain, as if the poor volunteers have any influence on the food donations.
• Being on food-aid might make you cold. Everybody has similar issues and one thing everybody has in common is that they desperately need food they simply cannot afford. People will curse each other, shove others, destroy things out of frustration and try to take more than they’re allowed without caring that others will get less or even nothing because of that.
• Being kind to workers goes a looooong way. First, of course, because they are human beings, but also because in my instabce for examples, volunteers hold back some vegan stuff, so I can have it. The others don’t care if their food is vegan or not, but I do and volunteers are considerate of almost anything if you are considerate. It is that easy. Complaining sadly will get you nowhere but I can empathize with the frustration and anger.
• If this system doesn’t make you cold, it makes you patient. Some weeks I get enough to get me through the entire week or even longer, some weeks the food I get doesn’t last me three days. It’s still better than nothing, even if it sucks but there will always be good days.
• Even if there’s not much food, people will still be happy about “useless” things. My local food-aid takes donations from a flower shop nearby as well and I don’t know what it is but there’s something so wonderfully mundane in having access to pretty flowers you otherwise wouldn’t spend money on. I got some pretty hot pink roses today!
• cook. I learned how to cook. You’ll quickly have to adapt to using whatever ingedrients you get to feed you. You also have to be able to manage your ingredients. Most are on the being of going bad, so that’s something you have to take into consideration too. Makes you really creative.
• Being poor is an easy way into becoming right-wing. At least in my case there are definitely mostly immigrants getting their food here. Taking all above points into consideration, if you witness the frustration, the fighting, the lack of empathy for others, it is easy to be lured into a bad mindset of “if the immigrants weren’t here, there’d be more for me”. Volunteers give their best to divide everything equally among the people. I’ve heard one sentence from other struggling people on multiple occasions now. “If they were all deported, there’d only be 30 people here instead of 100. We’d all get more.” This is what I mean when I say it makes you cold. Of course, everyone is only out for their own survival but the trap here is dangerous.
• people have no idea what being poor is like, including me. it’s a whole other world.

I’ve always been on and off poor. I don’t really know another way to live.

When I was a child, my father did random jobs - construction, factory - until becoming a luthier. And then, as one can guess, being an artist means your income is variable. He did well, once he got established, and then he did VERY well - and then the economy crashed.

My mother went in between being a state worker and working for him, so her income was more predictable.

So when I decided, at 23, to become an artist, I knew what I was setting myself up for. This lifestyle was not a surprise to me. There would be excellent months, and there would be months I didn’t work.

Thankfully, I am good at this lifestyle. I save up when I get extra money, to make the leans months liveable.

Becoming fully disabled was a bit of a hard adjustment, because I always had the option of service work to fall back on, and now, I can’t. My coffee shop ex boss’s face was a broken hearted mess when she told me I couldn’t come back. Because I can’t fall back on my body anymore. My body doesn’t cooperate.

I have used and loved SNAP for many, many a year. It makes disability livable. It’s a tiny joy at the beginning of every month - money I get to spend on food! Money just for food! I love it. I love cooking, and I love being creative with ingredients. That half an onion, a box of pasta, ground beef? Let’s make something delicious up.

People who equate money to moral value are so weird. I’ve never had much money, and that does not stop me from having a wonderful life, with wonderful friends. I am careful, and thoughtful, and I make it work.

Money does not equal morality, or value, or class. It’s just an imaginary concept. But unfortunately, one that people believe in so strongly it dictates the entire world.

.

I hate Capitalism

I have serval friends who are publicly asking for money, and I am pretty much flat broke. I guess I could charge my Chase credit card more until I can’t charge it anymore.

funniest part about being poor is when everyone is yelling about ‘boycott this’ or 'dont buy that’ and i’m just here like way ahead of you 👍

☝️

noliewithbtc

Dear lady

Please give me the strength

To buy flour and sugar

And not a whole chocolate bar

So i can have something sweet for at least two days

Instead of one..

my apartments tap water tastes like acid now for some reason even after filtering it so thats neat

yippee

non potable water

Well, one way to live sustainably is to simply be poor in our fine capitalist society.

You automatically buy less and mend/repurpose more, you never buy new if you can get away with it, you seldom buy things you don’t need (and sometimes not even those you do need), you have no choice but to accept gifts and use them no matter if you like them or not, you have to stretch what you have as far as possible anyway and use what you have until it is completely finished/done/worn through, meat is way too expensive anyways, so is sweets and sugary drinks, and also a car, or a holiday, or going to a restaurant, and the swap-and-lend-and-pirate/copy system in your community is pretty well developed.

It’s remarkable how many things we had to do when I grew up are now things people choose to do in the name of individual sustainability.