ZOOROPA

Author's note: This is my first posting to Blog Critics and, as you'll soon see, I tend to write primarily about myself, mostly because "to hell with everybody else." Since there's no "to hell with everybody else" genre, let's just call it "culture" for the sake of giving it a name. As for items for review I'll just stick something up I like and that you definitely should have heard or read by now. At the end I might do a little review, too. I dunno.

I've lived on the fringes of poverty all my life: never quite poor, never quite "ok." My family would vacillate between the two states constantly, trying desperately to turn 1 meager income (single mom, of course) into enough to raise a family on. My father paid child support in the sum of $50 a week 'till I was 18 which helped some, but the amount was meager and money was always tight. Compound that with the fact that my sister and I went to private schools (me, catholic school. My sister, performing arts school. She was a dancer and apparently I was a priest.) Not cheap. And we felt the strain.

I never really even knew we were poor 'till years later. And it wasn’t until my wife, who also grew up poor, told me about her family’s “pancake nights,” which they had often because they were cheap to make, that I realized our dinners were “poor-people dinners” too. The favorite meal around the house was tuna casserole. Pretty simple: it was a can of tuna, a box of mac and cheese, and, if one was available, a can of peas. That's it. Feeds a family of 3 pretty well for about a buck and a half (1977 dollars.)

I've worked almost steadily since I was 14 at a variety of shitty and ridiculous jobs. I’ve been a recording engineer, an IT guy, and a clerk at Caldor’s (It’s like Wal-Mart, only smaller.) I’ve spent a summer escorting telephone installers (my job was essentially to be “backup.” If shit went down I was supposed to “back them up.” Good thing for them that nothing ever went down or they would have found out just how far “back” I would have “upped.”) I’ve been a clerk at a video store, a salesman at a musical instrument store, a placement counselor at a temp agency (I got fired from here. I’ll tell you why another time), a video librarian at a company that placed TV commercials, and an account rep at another company that also placed TV commercials (I was fired from this one, too. Que Cera.)

Article Author: Star

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