we’re not poor anymore; get rid of it
By shag carpet bomb • May 9th, 2009 • Category: Belly Button Lintgod. i haven’t had a bout of serious i-dont-know-what-you-call-it/them feeling/s about poverty and crap since, what?, the holidays when i was babbling about the intense, mixed emotions of sadness and joy at being able to donate money with abandon.
oh, i have the feelings pretty much every day, in a way. there are three things that tend to make me kind of want to jump up and down and whoop with happy joy-joy about the world that is so amazing to me: walking on brick sidewalks (which I find lovely), the beauty of alleys, and buying a regular coffee at starbucks, b&n, or the indie coffee shop. Doesn’t matter; it’s buying *good* coffee that matters.
i guess y’all know why about the coffee. it wasn’t until i moved here that i’d ever had a coffee from starbucks or even some indie coffee shop. maybe something from a diner or fast food when on the road, but no $2 or more cup of joe for me.
now, it amazes me that I can afford to spend $1.80 on a coffee. I buy one or two a week, making my own the rest of the time. I could afford daily, if I wanted to afford it. But I think that’s wasteful. Still, when I do buy the coffee, I can never get over it. It just amazes me. There was a time I reused coffee grounds and coffee filters, to get the most out of a pot. Now, I have my own coffee press and no need to buy filters!
but anyway, just so you know: right now, i stink. i didn’t shower this morning since it’s like 95 degrees and 200 % humidity and i’d planned on spending the day in the “hot room”: the un-insulated, unheated and un-air-conditioned room above the garage where we’ve stored our unpacked crap since we moved here. i knew i’d get ridiculously filthy. the dust, the must, the blergh of unpacking and sorting crap. i’d get so filthy that the morning shower would just be a waste of water. so now i’m, like, virtually stewing in my own stank.
it’s amazing how dusty and, indeed, greasy things get in a storage unit. bah. i’d even bought an industrial-size roll of plastic wrap from a restaurant supply and wrapped the hell out of stuff when packing to move here.
the stuff is still filthy.
i’m filthy — and not in a good way. :)
sweat’s dripping down the small of my back, down the nape of my neck, my hair’s soaked. the back of my knees are perspiring for pity’s sake. i’m wearing two pair of glasses on my head because i forget one pair’s on my head already, go get another pair, and end up sticking yet another pair on my head once i no longer need them to squint at some label to figure out what the freak vintage one of sonshine’s discarded shirts is. *rolls eyes*
as most of you know, R is a major packrat. i have tendencies in that direction, but i’ve periodically purged. I have demonstrated the capacity to purge, and have even thrived in a purged environment, so I consider myself recovering. it’s one of those one day at a time things. I personally prefer it this way, now. In part, I think this is because, part of class mobility is learning to take on a new identity where you live with more modern, clean lines, uncluttered. It’s a mark of working-classness, I think, to live in cluttery environments — like Roseanne’s kitchen.
R has never, ever been on the de-cluttered, purged wagon. It drives me to distraction.
and even though i ended up tossing a lot of stuff when I moved from Florida to this state, and even when we moved from swank condo to this less expensive rental, i still managed to keep crap. i think i’ve said before, i was a packrat because i was terrified to throw anything out. if it was broken or a shirt was stained, I’d think, “But what if, someday, I have $5 to my name again. I might be glad that I have even a stained shirt.”
I’d retrieve stuff from the apartment’s dumpster, because it was salvageable or someone I knew might salvage it. If someone I knew was purging, I’d take it. Because it was free. And they were things. And it was good to have new things — of a sort. Having things, no matter how unworthy, it seems to matter when you don’t have a lot.
I thought about that yesterday, as I walked past homeless men all of whom, all of a sudden, were all using the downtown grocery store’s reusable bags to keep their stuff. It was weird, three men in one day, sitting in the park or in an alley or outside the mission, their two shopping bags filled to the brim with their things. the scene reminded me about the homeless women in the book, Tell Them Who I am. They carefully guarded their things. This was because their things reminded them that they had a life, they knew people, people loved them and people hated them. They were lovers, mothers, sisters, daughters, aunts, nieces, granddaughters not because they could be with their families, but because they could see their things and be reminded of a life they’d once had.
obviously, this is an expiatory ramble brought on by the anxiety of the process of getting rid of things.
I keep saying to R, “Just get rid of it. We’re not poor anymore. Do you really need to save the ankle brace from when you broke your ankle? The removable cast? The crutches? Get rid of them. If you break an ankle again, you can get new ones. We’re not poor anymore.”
The godamned CDs and DVDs. A lifetime overseas, with no access to DVD rentals, and a serious boner for music, and there are more boxes of these things than I can bear. Please, please, please: sell them. Get a quarter a piece for the CDs, 50 cents or a buck for the DVDs. You don’t watch them. You don’t listen to them. Burn the ones you really like. We’re not poor anymore; get rid of it. If no one buys them — there’s hardly a market for videos and CDs these days — then give them away to someone who needs them. Get rid of them; we’re not poor anymore.
And I keep saying it to myself as well. Muttering it in my head. Just get rid of it. You’re not poor anymore.
Alas, even though I thought I’d purged, I find I’m still pulling out stained clothes. I thought I’d managed to purge that stuff, and stop myself from packratting years ago, when I finally dragged myself out of my terror of the cops and got my shit together and hoed out my life and my head.
But then I went through poverty again. There there I was, packing for a new job, which paid enough to put me in the upper-middle class. But since it was a contract gig, because I didn’t really believe it would last, I thought I had to save everything. Pack it and take it with me, in case I needed it.
You have no idea how much stuff I refused to actually buy, that we needed, once we moved here. Precisely because I was terrified that this wasn’t real. No, no. Let’s not buy a sofa. I don’t know for sure if this job will last, I’d say to R. So, we camped out with the bed in the living room, living in a temporary sublet, waiting to see if the contract-to-hire gig really turned in to a hire.
I think there’s all this anxiety because I’m thinking it’s not real again. It’s been two years. Almost two and a half.
In the back of my mind, I’m still thinking it’s not real. That I’m going to be using rags for menstrual pads again. That I’m going to be saving, I shit you not, mustard and ketchup packs stolen from the fast food joint — because I think they are pretty non-perishable and quite portable and, if a bad hurricane hit, then I could use them for food.
Lord. I can’t believe I thought shit like that. But I did. Once, when things had gotten better financially, I did something splurgish at Christmas. My boss got me a membership at Sam’s so I could buy my office supplies there. Christmas shopping that year (2003), I saw this special canister, white with a pretty blue and yellow pattern, containing biscotti. I bought it for myself. It was ten dollars and full of biscotti to boot. It would look pretty in my kitchen. My christmas present to myself.
I had one of the biscotti, two actually: one chocolate, one lemon. They were so delicious. But I wouldn’t eat them. I wanted to save them for special. Plus, the hurricanes hit the following summer of 2004 and it occurred to me that the packaged treats might be good — and portable — for a hasty retreat to high and dry land if there was a nasty hurricane coming.
Really, I have no idea why I think this shit. But it cost so much money to stock up on hurricane foods that year that I tried to think of any way to save money on supplies.
It has been a trip to decide what’s worth selling and what’s worth giving away and what is just too junky, beat up, old, stained, etc to bother with. Yet, yet, yet: I can’t get to the point of assigning something to the “too junk to bother” pile, consigning it to the trash.
Why? Because, I *know* from past experience that some people will buy your stained shirts. When I lived in the country, the farmers loved them.
But why do I want to sell them to people who are, like I once was, so poor that they need stained shirts, and will pay a quarter a piece for them.
I’m not poor anymore. Give them away. But of course I know that the last thing that the Sally and the Goodwill want is my stained shirts.
Throw them out! STuff the landfill with them. And then of course I think, well maybe something could be done with them. It’s wrong to toss them out and stuff the landfill. Make a rag rug! Put ‘em in a big bag and sell ‘em as a bag of rags for someone who does a lot of hobby work and is in need of rags.
Meanwhile, I uncovered that pretty biscotti canister just now, unwrapped the layers of plastic wrap and found I still had to clean off the dust and grease from storage. packing a couple of years ago, I should have thrown out the biscotti. Did I? No. Of course not. Because, I was feeling so poor then — so down and out — that I was sure, in spite of this great job offer, I would need those biscotti some day.
Today, I threw them out.
Nothing’s too good for the working class, fuckers!
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I relate to this so much. I’ve written before about how it’s still hard for me to get out of that mindset of saving everything. It honestly doesn’t *occur* to me to, say, buy a new belt when the one I’ve had for years breaks. Rusty had to remind me, “It would cost like $10.” And I was like, “Oh. Yeah. You’re right. I *can* just buy a new one.”
This is something I have trouble conveying/describing to people.
I always come back to what you said about class not being a sweater you take on and off.
I tried to write a little about it recently in a few posts I did about class and how it’s more than just how much money you make at a given time; but I got verbally eviscerated and publicly made fun of for daring to write about my life, so I guess I didn’t do a very good job.
huh. which post was that. i remember reading one post on class, you wrote a couple of months ago maybe. i very vaguely recall that i could see some criticisms of it but nothing worthy of eviscerating, especially if you’re struggling to put words to something for which you have few words and concepts. that’s hard to do and people should be a lot more patient. the post i was thinking of, a woman wrote about class solidarity. i understand her point, and that’s an important concept, but it didn’t seem to apply to why you were defensive about private schools. it was like she had an axe to grind and it didn’t matter what you wrote; she was going to use whatever she wanted to in order to grind the axe. that’s my hazy memory anyway.
This really IS a fantastic piece. You have great flow as a writer, you know. I liked the last one you did about this subject too.
The content resonates for me as well. After being working-then-middle class as a kid, I was homeless as a teen, and my consciousness has been permanently fucked from it. I’m not even 40 yet but I’m like people’s grandparents from the Depression, I can think of a theoretical use for any item and thus an excuse not to throw it out.
Recently, I’ve been fortunate enough to have someone else’s privilege extended to me in a way that makes me suddenly in the midst of living a solidly middle class lifestyle, smack dab in a house in the ‘burbs and the whole bit, and it has been blowing my fucking mind. I’m constantly flummoxed by my own inability to cope with my own class anxieties (let alone other people’s). I still can’t even Goodwill clothes (good clothes, they just don’t fit), unless and until I’ve already replaced them.
Because you never know. And what if. And pants that don’t fit are so much better than no pants at all. And what would I do if I didn’t have safe clean bed/wearable shoes/decent food again. And omg the fancy cookies, I resent math more than low back pain and every time I eat a fancy cookie I am mentally calculating the per item cost from what I know the box cost, comparing it to the cost of survival needs and fretting about excess and then berating myself for being nutty enough to feel guilty over a fancy cookie. On and on.
Yeah, basically.
awww. thanks jen.
but man! i didn’t realize there were other freaks out there like me. i actually *like* math, so i can get totally caught up in that game of calculating if it would have been better to purchase a box of cookies than the single cookie. aiy. back when i was susie homemaker, working part-time and going to school, i thrived with coupons and rebates. each week, i’d get the sale flyers and circle what was on sale, check for coupons and rebates. sometimes, i’d find myself driving across town to save 5cents on a bag of flour — which was idiotic!
i will even do this now — when i know better! i’ll catch myself thinking: man, we should drive over to walmart where i know i saw the same thing for 25 cents less. *rolls eyes*
but man, it’s fascinating to learn other people have this same way of thinking. i mean, not happy because it’s good for us to do this, but relieved to know that i’m not the only one outside of my family.
I have this way of thinking too. Jen puts it perfectly when talking about the fancy cookies! Like I mentioned on one of my class posts on my blog, in the past few years I feel like I’ve stepped into this weird alternate reality that I’m still not adjusted to. It’s called middle class life… WTF?
Sponges. When the kitchen sponge starts to get grey and greasy, I can throw it away. And not wear it into two pieces, then discard those once they start to shred.