Poor and Gay

No, today’s tedious entry isn’t about Poor Steven, who has not blogged for us in nearly a year. (Don’t tell anybody, but sometimes I miss his presence.) Rather, this is about that most tedious of subjects: being a Poor. Spo-fans will be familiar with this self-characterization, and are sick and tired of hearing about it, but here we are.

Indirectly, Sassybear (the dear!) inspired this entry. He blogged about his collections, and growing up poor, and how it gives him satisfaction knowing he can own things he only dreamt of owning before. In the comment section, I nearly unloaded my own blatherings about poverty, but fortunately I refrained. So now you get to suffer. (Sadly, Sassybear is on a medical hiatus — send good thoughts his way, please — but if there is a silver lining it is that unlike you he need not suffer through this entry.)

I do consider myself a Poor. As prices rise and my unemployment continues, I am feeling this more and more. I am not sure that being a Poor has much to do with my homosexual tendencies, but they interact in a few ways.

Childhood

Unlike Sassybear, Michael54, John Scalzi, and maybe some of you, I did not grow up in financial poverty. My biological family was middle-class: they owned a house and a car (sometimes a car and a scary white van). Both my parents worked for a while, and when my father stopped working then my mother took on two jobs (plus the third shift taking care of the household, of course, plus the fourth shift of dealing with domestic abuse). From what I remember there was always enough to eat at home. I certainly did not get the most expensive things, or get everything I might have wanted, but I had enough toys. Our family did not eat at restaurants, although we would sometimes eat fast food at the mall food court. I never went to Disneyworld or any other fun multi-day trips. Other than multi-week visits to The Old Country my parents would take every few years, we did not go on vacations, which was probably for the best. Even day trips to the fall fair ended up in conflict most times. It took me many years to enjoy outings of any kind, and even now I prefer going on outings alone.

In retrospect my parents may have been lower middle-class. Fortunately I was born without the fashion gene, so I did not really notice that our clothes were from cheap department stores. Although there were probably lots of things I wanted to buy, with a few exceptions I did not want them badly enough to suffer, and I vaguely recall feeling embarrassed even to ask. Maybe I was more aware of my parents’ financial status than I thought.

I do not have many nice things to say about my childhood home, especially during my teenaged years. But financially I suppose we were okay. I feel I picked up a few habits of being a Poor from my upbringing, but not many. That changed when I left home.

Bohemian Life

I suppose I started becoming a Poor when I left home. I did not exactly have legal housing at the time, so I had to scramble. At the time, though, it felt like an adventure to scrimp and save so that I could simultaneously afford school and food. This got more difficult when my squatting was discovered and I was coerced into paying for an apartment, but I (sort of) managed.

As I was born without the fashion gene (or the social awareness gene, really) most of the time I was blissfully unaware of looking (and sometimes smelling) ratty. I do remember some bad experiences of me not being able to take off my boots and my feet rotting as a result, but somehow I got through my education.

I had legal(ish) housing for grad school, which helped my feet recover. I suppose by this time my degeneration into a Poor was well underway, but since I was a student it did not stand out as much as it otherwise would have. (This is not really true. Even back then I stood out quite a bit compared to my peers, but that is because they had life skills I lacked.)

Genteel Decline

After grad school, I made a series of bad life choices that ended up with me working in prestigious-seeming jobs that paid me very little. In two decades of working I managed to crack the local poverty line twice. Because I am a miserly skinflint I did not mind this much; I was still able to save a fair amount of my earnings. But I was well on the way to perdition by this point. I became obsessed with saving money, which often made me penny-wise and pound-foolish. I would move a lot from one rented room to another, hoping that housemates would be tolerable. Despite being obese, I became obsessed with cheap and/or free calories. And I constantly felt as if everything was going to fall apart. To this day I find the concept of a five year plan laughable. At any point, I have little reason to believe that I will be around a year from now.

Thankfully, I retained enough middle-class values to save money. But in most other ways I am a Poor. When I get access to a resource, I use it up as quickly as possible, because it might not be there tomorrow. When there are bargains to be had, I stock up, because maybe these things will be expensive when I need them. I am loathe to throw things away — what if I need them later?

In my bohemian years scrimping and saving seemed like an adventure. Over the years that feeling of accomplishment was replaced by a dread of deprivation. I have to be very careful about depriving myself of extraneous “treats”, because when I start feeling deprived I get angry and start spending like a drunken sailor.

Meanwhile the cost of living has been rising dramatically, and my purchasing power has not. Moreover, my work arrangements fell apart, and because I am a Broken it is not clear I will ever be able to work again. (There is a long family history of people in my family leaving the workforce early and not returning.) It is this dread over not being able to meet expenses that is currently the worst part of being a Poor.

Sometimes I am disconcerted by just how out of place I am compared to the rest of you. I buy foods that are cheap or on clearance. I dread the idea of eating at a restaurant where the portions are small, the food is expensive, and one is expected to tip some mysterious amount. My clothes are not from the cheap department stores; they are from thrift stores, and many of them are damaged enough to be embarrassing. I regularly patch up old pants and ripped shirts to wear in the garden.

Every time prices jump by ten or twenty cents on my junk food I feel the anxiety grow.

This year a lens on my glasses cracked. I am still wearing that pair of glasses. I have been wearing them for over a decade, and am well aware that they are not the right prescription for me any more. I do have a spare pair (purchased when I had a job with health insurance) but they are for special occasions. I may eventually break down and pay for a new pair of glasses, but I am holding off.

I will never own a car. I will never have a house of my own. I have been blessed with stable housing for a few years now, but sooner or later this will end, and I will be in dire straits. I could easily end up in a rooming house (if I am lucky) or an encampment (if I am not).

Taking a week-long vacation to Palm Springs or Bucks County is out of the question. I do take day trips on my bicycle, but even a night’s stay at a bed and breakfast is out of my budget.

Cellphone plans are expensive, but it is not fair to say they are out of the budget, because most applicant tracking systems don’t let you enter the phone extension from the number you got at the community centre. Still I am holding off in the hopes that I can avoid the expense.

I do not invite people over to socialize, and rarely take up other people’s offers to socialize with them. “Going out for a coffee” is no big deal for most of you, but it can get quite awkward for me.

It’s fun to read your blogs and interact with you in the comments, but I am under no illusions that you would want to interact with me in real life. Our socio-economic spheres are too different. So I appreciate the interactions we have, and hope you never discover what I am really like.

Fraud

I am not actually a Poor. How could I be? I am highly educated. I have money in the bank. I have computers and internet access. For now, I have a tolerable place to live. Sometimes my diet feels monotonous, and I wish I could buy more vegetables in the wntr, but I have enough to eat and it is tasty enough. I have enough free entertainment (blogs, podcasts, books) to keep me occupied for the rest of my days. For the time being, I am even managing to pay for essential medical expenses (my cracked glasses notwithstanding). I have nothing to complain about. If I insist on acting like a Poor it is my own fault. I have bootstraps, don’t I?

Gay

It turns out I wrote about this before, and most of that entry still applies.

The reality is that once you are no longer young and pretty, it takes some financial leverage to find sex partners — especially in hookup culture, where first impressions count for so much. Maybe that is for the best; I can’t expect anybody to date me for my personality. But the expenses required to maintain even a basic gay dating life are so far outside my budget it is laughable.

I suppose cruising for sex in the bushes is a possibility, but even if I had such inclinations I look sufficiently homeless that people will think I am out to mug them.

I know that there are some Poors who enter relationships. Maybe some of those relationships work out, but in my experience many don’t, because a common comorbidity of Poverty is Drama, and Drama is a great way to tear relationships apart. I have quite enough unhappiness and stress in my life as it is, so the prospect of adding Drama to the mix is one I actively abhor. A lifetime of celibacy it is, then!

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