Well, that’s it. We’ve been holding our breath around here, believing in the possibility of refinancing through Countrywide, but we were turned down. Too much “deferred maintenance” on our house for the worth we thought it had. The inspector who visited us is hated with the heat of a thousand suns, right now.
I bet you're not wondering how to make your payments, are you Angelo? Fucker.
So do I look for yet more work? We can prune a few things, I’m guessing. No more cable TV. We can’t give up the Internet, if only because a significant part of our income comes from the connection. But there will be no more unnecessary spending in this household at all. No more breakfasts on the run. No buying of books, even used. No more nights out for a drink. Can’t buy the snowshoes I’ve been saving for. Can’t rent skis. Can’t buy new socks. And we have to evaluate every food purchase we make for its nutritional value versus expense.
There will be more dumpster runs for food, and it won’t be nearly so entertaining from here on out. I no longer can think of knitting as a hobby. It is no longer an adventure, but a slog.
Which of course I knew was coming.
I planned for it, in my head. I knew that optimism was unwarranted as far as our finances went. Everyone’s losing their jobs. Everywhere. So we’re far from alone. We just have to hang on to the jobs we have, and figure out where else we can cut.
I am so glad I only paid $50 on my medical bill. They’ll be lucky if they get any more.
That’s what I’ve been thinking about. Trying to get a grip on that old feeling of being happy not just in spite of being poor, but because of it.
I know that sounds crazy. You’re not supposed to like being poor. You’re not supposed to think it’s a little bit funny sometimes or dance too much with a sort of jubilant fatalism.
It’s antithetical to my upbringing. I’m supposed to be ashamed that when the dryer breaks, I hang my clothes around the studio (which is really a converted hundred year old garage, and only partially converted if I’m honest) and pretend I live in Russia circa 1975. With the snow, I can’t go for a current age ghetto Thailand, like in the movie The Blossoming of Maximilio Olivero. Besides, I’m not that poor.
I have three jobs, after all. I’m not in danger of losing any of them, as far as I know. And so although we are scraping the edges of all possible credit sources, while someone upstairs types away at grants and I click along at SAT essays by the dozens—balancing phone calls from the schools I sub at, and trying to get as many hours as I can take—I ought to be happy. I’m still not required to get rid of all my waking hours in order to eat. I’m not worrying about losing anything that’s important to me.
But all it takes is one major appliance breakdown, and I kind of feel the sense of standing at the edge of an abyss.
But why not laugh, when you’re at the edge of the abyss? No sense in crying about it. No sense in worrying any more than I do. (Which is all the time.)
I go back and forth between feeling a bit ashamed for feeling poor, when so many people have so much less. And trying to realize just how much we live shamelessly without so many things that other people around me take for granted. People around me still go to Best Buy to buy televisions. They still go out to eat. They still go on vacation. These are all things I can’t imagine doing, or when I would be able to at anytime in the future. So I feel privileged while at the same time feeling surrounded by rather clueless people who are oblivious to the idea of living on so little.
The conundrum.
So if I’m going to take advantage of my background, all the privilege I was born with, then I think it is important that I embrace where I am. I mean really love it. Get a thrill from the idea of dumpster diving. Feel pleasure in the learning to make my own tortillas and bread. Celebrate the new skills i’ve been gaining, anticipate with joy a summer of my fingers in the dirt, wandering about with nothing to do but a book to write.
Yoga is free. Baking is nearly free. Dumpster diving is free. Watching cable TV isn’t free, but it’s cheaper than a movie (which we never do at all) and going out to eat. Painting the house this summer will be free, because we’ve already spent the money on it anyway. Walking in the woods is free. Biking around is free. Snowshoeing is free. Reading fabulous books from the library is free. Playing with the cats is free. Surfing the net isn’t free, but we use it to work, so it balances in our favor. Drinking fabulous tea isn’t free, but it’s beautiful. Homeschooling—the truly fabulous times—those are all free. Learning is free. And infinite.
I remind myself of how big the cosmos is, and how little my life is. It’s ridiculous to be anything but happy at the miracle that I have consciousness, my senses and half a lifetime ahead of me.
I was watching a program on our local PBS station yesterday on the creation of Morgan Park, a neighborhood in Duluth. (TiVO if you are one of those who pay attention to Duluth’s PBS schedule and wonder how the heck I watched a show from a week ago.)
Morgan Park was a company town built for employees of US Steel. I mean, the real kind of company town where the houses are all kinda the same except more classy for the supervisors’ families, and everyone’s kept very much under the thumb of the bossman. You couldn’t have a messy yard, for instance, or the company would come by and clean it up, docking your pay for the expense. You couldn’t plant trees (which really did make the place look an awful lot like the suburbs I grew up in—flat greenness with a few skinny saplings to break the monotony).
But gardens. There weregardens everywhere. Everyone had one in their backyard. There were huge community gardens, and there was even a garden next to the neighborhood club.
I’m trying to imagine this today. Everyone growing stuff in their backyards that is more about eating than what trendy flowers you bought at the parking lot nursery this spring. It would be such a transformation from what we are now.
It still seems like food gardening is seen as the province of those who have too much time on their hands. The underemployed. The retired. Eco-yuppies. If you garden, then there’s something suspiciously earthy about you.
Up until the 1950s, when American suburbia went all crazy-like, people had gardens because it was sensible.
What happened? Car culture, perhaps. Maybe people were so exhausted by the war effort community togetherness of victory gardens, that when the effort ended they felt relieved at stopping it. Lawns got more manicured and sterile looking. And the gardening that the “ladies of the house” got involved in was flower-centric. It was about fitting in, and showing off your color-sense. An extension of your living room, replete with a bunch of crap like wagon wheels or artfully placed stones.
Nowadays, it seems like anyone with any amount of income at all is hiring someone with brown skin to dash in an hour a week and buzz-tame the lawn into bland uniformity. Weeds are the enemy, and shrubbery is king.
These places rarely have gardens. It would be too messy, I have heard people say. Disturbs the aesthetic, I guess. Attracts vermin or deer, and then you gotta deal with poop that isn’t from your dog and all kinds of wildlife that are probably dangerous or something. Especially I hear the statement that the deer will eat it all and so what’s the point.
Duluth tends to be a little more relaxed than most places. There are community gardens, and people regularly seem to use big parts of their back yards for food growing. But it’s still more rare than it ought to be. It’s weird to drive by houses on the edge of town that have vast lawns unmarred by any growing thing other than grass. So much space!
Will we change, as times get tougher? Will more of us dig up a few feet of sod, and get our fingers in the dirt?
I’m plotting. There are a few portions of our rather wild meadowy yard that are just begging for raised beds for herbs and vegetables.
We already are the recipients of a huge family garden tended by Grandpa Meadowhawk. And I do mean huge. We live all year on the canned tomatoes and green beans, frozen raspberries, jellies and jams. We just ate the last of the onions and carrots. Still have plenty of potatoes and apples, dill and dried parsley. They have chickens too, and I sometimes get off the vegan bandwagon for the eggs. It’s a bounty. And such a help with our food bills!
Garden in Winter
Grandpa Meadowhawk's chickens
So because we are being fed so well from the family garden (where we are banned from helping *at all* mind you. Grandpa and Grandma Meadowhawk enjoy doing things themselves, thank-you-very-much) it’s hard to know what to grow at our own home. Don’t want to end up with excess we can’t use, after all.
But then, so what if we grow too much? Perhaps in tough times we can all sort of enjoy that sense of community. If you grow more than you can use, give it to your neighbors. Share!
(What a concept, eh? Is that crazy hippie talk or what. Sharing. Isn’t someone going to come by and call me a commie?)
Perhaps you read my post about how we’ve decided not to buy veggie stock/broth anymore, but instead have resolved to make our own.
Today was a new experiment.
We’ve been buying Buena Vida tortillas for about five years. And we’ve been very loyal customers, since we haven’t cared for the organic brands we tried (except for the spelt ones, which were simply too pricey for regular consumption), and the other non-organic brands all seemed to have trans fats.
And just incidentally, here are the ingredients of Buena Vida brand tortillas: bleached enriched flour, water, modified potato starch, glycerine, wheat gluten, salt, baking powder, potassium sorbate, cellulose gum, monoglycerides, fumeric acid.
Now I’m sure that most of those things have some sort of packaging purpose, but yeah—I’ll think I’d rather have my tortillas sans glycerine, or anything sorbate, gum or acid.
If you think about it, tortillas are simple to make, right? Flour and water and a little salt? All over the Spanish-speaking world, people make their own tortillas, so why not us?
I confess that this is yet another foray into making something that I probably would have been acquainted with long ago, if I hadn’t been raised in a family where dinner came in various types of boxes and plastic bags from the freezer.
So, no. I’ve never made tortillas in my life. Nor have I witnessed them being made by someone else.
I started by checking out Laurel’s Kitchen, which is a necessary text for learning about nutrition, being a vegetarian and basic cooking techniques that you can then modify for a more adventurous palate. (They tend toward a rather 70s hippie blandness that many find a little … overly crunchy.)
I skipped the recipe for corn tortillas, finding that at the end she points to the basics of chapati manufacture as a good way to make regular flour tortillas.
Simple:
Electric skillet on high
3 cups of flour (I used multi-purpose white, bought in bulk)
1 cup water
1 teaspoon of salt
2 tablespoons of oil
Mix then knead until smooth. Then pinch off balls of dough; spread with fingers from the center and then roll out until thin and round. Throw into the skillet until lightly browned in spots. Flip over until done.
The first few I made were definitely nowhere near round, and had too-thin spots or holes in the center. Then some were too thick. But I quickly got better at it. Here are the results:
Ta-da!
Ate one with leftover cajun black bean stew that has passed for an adequate burrito stuffer, topped with freegan salsa and vegan sour cream. Not bad at all.
Sorry Buena Vida. I think we’ll be making our own from now on.
I hereby dub thee: The Bush Depression. Because there’s no doubt, since certain people are already doing it, that they’re going to try to blame it on Obama. Because somehow, magically, everything is Obama’s fault, even retroactively. Let’s hope it catches on. After all, if we’re not going to send Bush to jail for ordering torture and illegal wiretapping, then he ought to at least get this legacy named after him.
(I have no right to dub it, it seems, say the some 22,000 hits on Google.)
I need to get my hair cut, but I can’t afford it. Not until I get another paycheck. My roots are all dishwater blonde instead of red, and … I really ought to just wear scarves and forget about it for right now. Cutting it myself seems rather desperate. But I’m also afraid not to go to my brilliant but expensive hair stylist. It’s worse since she’s a friend. If she wasn’t I would change up and never look back. (In fact, I once tried to quit, but her talent is like a drug. I use her to keep me from looking too much like the 40-something housewife I feel like I’m becoming. Or am, duh.)
Here are some more quotes from The Great Divide, by Studs Terkel:
From Bruce Bendinger (Terkel calls him an “advertising wunderkind”):
You have the knee-driven underclass, which we continue to market sugar and salt and alcohol and nicotine to. We make a good amount of money off of them. You’ll find black America still drinkin’, still smokin’ a lot of cigarettes, still spending a high percentage of their cash on this. You can understand this in terms of what their options are. Much more concerned with short-term gratification, for reasons that are sad but obvious. Marketing things like potato chips, salty snacks, may seem innocent. If you’re black, chances are you will retain a greater percentage of salt and be more prone to high blood pressure. Take a look at the mortality rates in black America, you’ll find one of the side effects of these consumption patterns. They are fueled by the […] type of marketing, which contributes to—I don’t think you live as long. [….]
Bendinger
There’s a new kind of poverty in America. It’s time. All the people makin’ all this cash, you know what they don’t got? And I’m one of ’em. They don’t got time. The time-poor. Both of ’em are workin’. They’re workin’ hard, makin’ all this money, fifty, sixty hours a week. Mom isn’t home makin’ the tuna casserole. They both come home beat from their jobs. They’re gonna go out, they’re gonna order pizza. They don’t have time to make dinner, to do a lot of things. It’s really changed the way a lot of America lives. My lawyer says every couple in business together needs a wife, because there’s no one who’s cookin’ the dinner, who’s cleanin’ the house.
Another way that’s reshaping America is the move from parenting to child management. You don’t have mom raising the kids. She gets ’em till it’s time for Montessori, then she’s back in the work force to make the money to pay for Montessori and the designer kids’ clothes.
[From The Great Divide, by Studs Terkel, which was published in 1987.]
I guess I get to this point: At least I don’t eat bad food. At least I have plenty of time to live in my house, love my family, and be in the present instead of being stuck looking ever toward a mythical retirement. At least I have time to read books. At least I have time to drink tea and look out the window. At least going for a walk in the woods isn’t outside the realm of possibility.
I live the life of Riley. Not being able to get a haircut is way down on the list of things that ought to cause me any stress.
I think the primary function of cold on me is that I want to stay home and listen to Ketil Bjørnstad and David Darling and just brood on stuff.
I’m feeling a little weird, because I’ve broken through a boundary I’d hoped I’d never have to. You see, I have spent my entire career-life avoiding the big beast of School Districts. I mean, okay—I accepted that I’d entered the profession of teaching, even the ridiculous idea that grammar and literature were somehow equal in importance in this world, but to actually enter the School System seemed like going too far entirely.
I became an English teacher because at age 18 the only thing I wanted to do was read and write until i was too old and blind to do so. And I suppose I shuddered in horror at the thought that I might be expected to sell something or be perky for any length of time.
So I became a teacher because it seemed like something I could be into: spreading the love of reading and writing to the street tough and delicate goth girl alike. I was pretty good at it. Kind of bought into the “teachers are saints” idea—that teachers were sort of ascetics who did what they did because they loved knowledge above all else. (Yeah… no.)
When I graduated from college, the idea of working for a big district made me blanch. So instead I thought of going overseas to Department of Defense schools, teaching on army bases in exotic locales like Bahrain or the Philippines where supposedly you got a maid whether you wanted one or not. I couldn’t do that right off, though. For that, you needed to have two years’ teaching experience or a Masters Degree. The idea of staying in college didn’t appeal. I was sick of being poor. (Oh, poor me, who had to watch every penny for four years.) So I looked at all the Chicago Tribune classifieds and fixated on romantic teachery destinations like wagon trains for delinquents and the Navajo Indian reservation in New Mexico, where I tried to imagine myself living on a windy desert plain in a trailer with no plumbing.
I never ended up going off to the desert or the wagon train schools, but did always keep my career in small alternative schools where I was gifted with a large amount of autonomy, the ability to forget curricula designed by bureaucrats and stay attached to my idealism.
For a while. Then it was: do I really want to spend the rest of my life being an authority figure over children and young adults who are essentially being stunted by the whole monolith of industrial-era schooling? (Kids in alternative schools are often just “rejects” of the mainstream system.) There’s so much wrong with what’s going on there. But staying out of the Beast that are big school systems? That was a priority.
At one point, I left teaching entirely to work as a cabdriver, and then a lowly bookstore clerk. (These were supposed to fund my foray into a writing career, but as I ought to have known, lower-skill jobs take a lot of time and energy.) A few years ago, I ended up seeking the financial security of substitute teaching. It’s an easy way to have a job without having to go to it every day. If I want to stay home, I can; and I work as much as I need to to pay the bills. But I still managed to stay at smaller schools: private, charter, tribal. Anything to stay out of the Beast.
But now, on a sort of whim fueled by the foreboding of our financially bereft near-future, I applied to become a member of the School District’s substitute pool. It was either that or apply to work for the census, which, while probably interesting, pays crap. If I’m going to work for a bureaucracy, I might as well get paid as much as possible.
I like kids. I do. I look forward to hanging out with them and perhaps making their imprisonment less onerous for a few hours. I feel stupid to whine about having yet another job, but I am now employed in more “jobs” than I ever have had in my life, while still making well under the poverty level.
The one glaring thing about all this, of course, is that I can still count it as a personal choice. I have no right to complain when there are thousands losing their jobs every day with little to no prospect for replacement income.
[Looking for pictures to illustrate “substitute teacher”? Oy. Every page of images has at least two pornos and a mug shot. I kinda lost heart.]
One question we had to ask ourselves the other night: do we think we’re too good to eat Stovetop Stuffing? Not if it’s freegan.
Eating healthily is important to us. We have built an organic life, with much of our produce coming from a very large family garden. But with times getting tougher, and an anticipated severe restriction in our collective income, we’ve been experimenting with ways to cut our food budget without falling completely off the deep end. Which we may have done, with our recent dip back into Freeganism.
The problem with eating freegan, of course, is not so much the deviation from a vegan diet—since we’re not buying or supporting factory farmed meat or participating in encouraging animal death, our diet might fall within the ethical parameters of veganism if not the dietary. It’s more a question of chemicals. I’m not worried about the ethics or aesthetics of dumpster diving. I’m worried about the crap that I might be inviting into my body when I eat something non-organic. Or, worse, some overly processed crap that some company has stuffed into a box and called “food.”
Mr. Meadowhawk saved three boxes of Stovetop stuffing from the dumpster on New Year’s Eve. So after much grimacing and gnashing of teeth … or a few read-aloud performances of the ingredients list and a mutually agreed upon assessment that this was a dietically terribly thing to do to ourselves… we’ve decided to eat them. I mean, we could give them away. But Mr. Meadowhawk is uncomfortable with sharing the fact of our freegan foray proudly, as I might otherwise. Giving someone food without telling them it came from a dumpster is unethical. And since we don’t want to be a topic of either admiring or critical gossip on this matter at the moment, we’d prefer to eat it. It’s easier than going on food stamps.
I’m supposed to know that MSG and preservatives and high fructose corn syrup and partially hydrogenated oils aren’t good for me. But since I don’t really know why, I guess I’d better look it up.
…
MSG: made from fermented sugar sources, a flavor enhancer that might give people migraines or might cause breathing problems in some people. Okay real food does not need “flavor enhancing” with something that looks like this and isn’t salt:
MSG
High Fructose Corn Syrup: makes you fat because your body doesn’t process it like real food.
Partially Hydrogenated Oil: Trans Fat !!! Same as above.
Caramel Coloring: supposedly toxic (no proof to that scientifically); might contain GMO corn.
But we’ve committed ourselves to eating what we’ve rescued, secretly, on an evening when no children must be fed. Is it food or isn’t it? Do we really think we’re so high and mighty that we won’t eat the same food that America eats all the time?
On the back of the box there is a recipe for “Easy Chicken Bake”. It calls for chicken, the box of stuffing, “spread”, sour cream, a can of cream of chicken soup (condensed), and a bag of frozen mixed vegetables.
Here’s what I did instead:
1 can of mock duck, drained and cut into pieces
(Received on Freecycle, but it’s from Taiwan and so we hope it isn’t full of some environmental pollutant.)
some tofu “sour cream”
(a Sarah Kramer recipe)
some firm tofu, soy milk and faux chicken broth, blended together
the box of Stovetop stuffing (freegan recovery)
4 T butter (freegan recovery)
a carrot, chopped (from the organic garden)
a stalk of celery, chopped
a hunk of turnip, chopped
some leftover swiss chard, chopped
five mushrooms, chopped
(all organic, bought at the local co-op.)
Hopefully, all the healthy stuff outbalanced the stuff that seems chemically problematic. Honestly, it was tasty, if in fact it was poison. I didn’t get a headache or otherwise feel poorly. Neither did Mr. Meadowhawk. But we aren’t happy about ingesting stuff so full of carbs and stuff that Kraft has decided people should eat.
So I wallow in this conundrum, which I’m sure most readers would find tedious and overly hippiefied, if not elitist and ridiculous. Is food that is more like “food” with quotation marks around it better left in the dumpster? We’re rescuing stuff that already counts as a hideous waste of energy (packaging, processing) and even a crime against nature. But does that mean we have to willingly take the chemicals infused into it into our own bodies to metabolize it? If we are not willing to eat it ourselves, why would we inflict it on a person less fortunate than we are? Are homeless people or food shelf visitors less deserving of good food than the rest of us?
Happiness 