Those “we tried being poor for a week and this is what we found out” articles

The term “poorface” seems a bit, I don’t know, insensitive? But otherwise this is an excellent article about austerity.

Alan and I did a pretty brutal version of austerity when I first immigrated and couldn’t work yet (it took nine months to receive work authorization), and for years after. Alan made just enough selling cars and later doing call centre work for a bank for us to pay our fixed bills, with $16 left over most weeks for gas and food—and we survived because of the kindness of our friends and family, ineligible for any government assistance because of my immigration status.

I remember picking noodles I’d spilled into the sink out of the drain and carefully washing them because that was the last of the food in the house. I remember walking to the grocery closest our house with five bucks and walking the store for hours to calculate the precisely most optimum use of that money. I remember going to that same grocery with no money just to pretend to shop so I could eat the samples they had in the deli. I remember Alan’s parents got us a membership at Costco, and our delight at them having a dozen huge pork chops for ten bucks, and inviting all our friends over for a barbecue and feeling flush because we actually had enough to eat for once. I remember paying exactly $3.47 for gas because that was all I had. I remember the relief when my work visa finally came through, followed by helpless fury as I realized jobs in my new country didn’t provide benefits worth spit.

It’s funny the article quotes “Common People” because William Shatner had just come out with his delightful cover of it with Ben Folds, and I listened to it all the time, and I couldn’t decide if I was the common person or the tourist in the song because our parents weren’t *also* immured in poverty which gave us options our truly poor neighbors didn’t have, but we were still stuck for at least the next several years. (That turned out to be optimistic—that was in 2004/5, and we didn’t achieve food security until around 2010, and didn’t get back into the middle class until around 2012. We’re still only doing okay because we have four wage-earning adults in one house.)

Anyway, read this.

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