SHE GOT ME SPENDING.

I finally have gotten used to this OMG STATE OF THE ART HOLYSHIT ERGONOMIC keyboard so I can type a post without wanting to throw it out the window. There will probably be typos still, though. Sorry.

but, uh, okay, here we go.

listen. i’m a disabled lady. I have PTSD and Nonverbal Learning Disorder. I was born with the latter, it seems, and I acquired the former when I was 16. So ever since I was able to begin working, I haven’t been able to work any more than 15 hours a week. i am waiting on this illustrious court date to get my disability money. sigh.

i go to college because i love taking the courses and learning shit. i go to a little community college where almost everyone is poor and not ‘college-aged,’ either they are high school drop outs who decided to go to school right after, or they are people who made it to 25 and wanted to try to do something to increase their earnings. i wish i could go to this school forever but it’s only a 2 year. after this, i would like to go to a state school. even if i HAD the grades to go to a private university (lolololol) i wouldn’t because the culutre of privilege and money absolutely INFURIATES ME and MAKES ME ILL.

my parents are middle-class-ish. my father ran away from communist Romania in the late 70s and married my mother, who immigrated from Montreal to be with him in New York City. they began their own small business fixing x-ray equipment during Reaganomics and were surprisingly rather successful until the end of the dot-com era. i did not grow up poor. but i see my impending poverty right before my eyes and so you can understand my worries and anger. also, i never learned any middle class skills. my parents became middle class by chance, basically. i mean, of course they worked hard for their business, but a lot of it was luck, as everything in life is. and more importantly to my point, they did not do it by going to college in the US and climbing the corporate ladder and making resumes and bullshit. so i never learned that.

eventually, i did. i was handed to a job coach or whatever they are at county mental health and she taught me everything i needed to know and i have my little data entry job because of her.

and everything i learned made me sick. the resumes, the application process, how to do an interview ‘right,’ the cover letters. it was all so fake, and privileged, and it was such a GAME. imagine, a game so you can survive! it was like the advice you get in middle school about boys. ‘now, seem interested, but not too much or else you’ll look desperate! and dress pretty but if you go overboard he’ll think you’re a slut!” that’s basically the advice i got for getting a job, except you know, the language being geared towards getting a job.

this shit is sucking my soul dry. i have to quit this job next week and i’ve been getting teary all the time, afraid i’m surely making the wrong decision, and i will look lazy and everyone will be disappointed in me. damien says he won’t be, which is nice, but y’all know what i mean.

now listen i’m not trying to be one of those artfucks who watch david lynch movies and drink soy chai and whatever being like, ‘oh, capitalism really is so awful! sigh! we should all just be nonconformists! *sip of soy chai*’ but i try to live my life according to what i think is right and moral.

so i go to college, which i am lucky to be able to do, because i love learning, and if one day i am well enough to have a career i’d like it to be one where i can help people, so that’s what my course selection concentrates on. i get bad grades and i don’t feel bad about it in a guilty way, it simply makes me afraid that i will not be able to attend 4-yr college after this. i don’t think grades prove anything in particular except that maybe you are good at busywork, which i am not, because of this learning disorder shit. i think if one could watch me in a classroom, they’d see i participate more than others because i very much LOVE most of my classes, i absorb the information told to me, whatever. but who cares about that, right? we wanna know how much busy work you can complete in a semester! like, yeah, let me ruin the little joy i get from life by attending school by trying to convince the rest of society that i’m allowed to exist. i work my little job employed by absolutely corrupt people who have violated ERISA and NYS labor law and ‘forget’ to pay us our full hours and we can’t report them because this shitty little job is all we have. after this experience, i refuse to work for corporations. right now i transcribe interviews for the mother of a friend of mine which has proven to be a lot less, uh, nausea inducing, even if i now know more about sturgeon fish than i have ever cared to know in my entire life. i can’t bring myself to, first of all, give myself even MORE reasons to be disgusted with life, and to feed this system. obviously, i can’t avoid it altogether, i mean i applied for disability after all. but my little rebellions are important to me.

people think my viewpoint is immature and i don’t give a fuck. i think it’s simpleminded to say ‘well this is how it is and being rebellious at your age is so passe and you need to think of how you will support your family!’ and guess the fuck what, i do. and my man and i are trying to think of ways in which we can support ourselves and his daughter while still being conscionable and not having our fucking souls and morals and humanity die. we talk about this almost every day.

my boyfriend did everything by the capitalist book, you know, he went to college, got a bachelor’s degree, had his name engraved into the president’s list, began building his journalism resume in his 2nd year of school, spent his last semester working 4 jobs while doing a full course load blah blah blah. okay well now he works as a night auditor at the Super 8 motel and as an office assistant, working 60 hours a week just to pay bills, after all that effort. and he is so brilliant, he is a magnificent writer and wrote beautiful songs and he does all his jobs very well and works hard at everything and instead he sleeps 2 hours a day just so he can be technically ‘alive.’ i am getting my associates in january and guess what sort of work i can do? data entry and transcription. what was the point of that degree? to get another one, apparently. well apparently it doesn’t guarantee you shit either.

listen this is all disconnected because it is 5 in the fuckin morning and i don’t really care right now. all i’m saying is, you have to do what you gotta do and are able to. and if you can get a ridiculously high paying job to support your family, fine. but don’t pretend you’re doing any favors for the rest of us. your luck and your success at the game hasn’t done a good goddamn thing for us. yeah yeah now you have more time to devote to volunteering or whatever shit but by playing into the system so that you can support yourself IN EXCESS, you are undoing all your volunteering for people like us, okay? because that is the fucking system THAT HAS US HERE. for god’s sake!

obviously most people can’t do what i’m trying to do and it’s probably better that way. i doubt i’m proving much of anything except that this is the 1-way ticket to being poor and shit. but i like to think that perhaps people will look at some of my decisions and see it for what it is, which is an expression of my disgust for the entire system and my little ways of trying to buck it from my less-privileged standpoint, because it is what i believe to be moral and true. and maybe it will make them feel something! i’m not sure.

but no. you are doing us NO FAVORS, just for yourself and your family. and i don’t care about ‘how hard you worked’ to get where you are and whatever shit. because while you were off making disgusting amounts of money, we have been working JUST AS HARD AS YOU. and fuck all it got us, because we didn’t have the little ‘luck’ component like you did.

christ almighty.

Tags: anger, disability, financial privilege, privilege, the futility of life