Prologue: It's been intimated this week that I've been acting ungrateful recently, despite my dutifully continued efforts to keep the kitchen clean, plan meals and grocery shop, and keep babysitting requests to the minimum of necessary school/work time, or during naptime, or after kiddo's sacked out at 8pm. So I'm dedicating this blog entry to my very generous, sometimes cantankerous, often insufferable, but always loving and endearing Rent Sponsors: this one's for you, mom and dad.
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Find Free Rent: Now, I'm definitely not recommending any clearly unhealthy/illegal ways of finding free rent like trading sex/information/romantic emotional attachments for a place to live. What I am saying is that, if you want to live in poverty well, should you somehow be able to make an arrangement work for you with that rich uncle or parents/grandparents that are greedy for time with your kiddo, if you can make that work and not shoot yourself or anyone else: Do it. It GREATLY improves your standard-of-living not to have to pay a third or half of any income (or more!) just to have a private residence. E.g. you can afford to buy a new shirt, or toothbrush every once in a while.
It has its downsides, I admit: I fantasize about moving out almost daily. I talk about it on about a weekly basis, and about once a month I pack my family into my car and drive around the shitty parts of town looking for FOR RENT signs. I get stared at because I'm a white girl driving around somewhat-ghetto-neighborhoods in a 5 year old car with a dog hanging out the back window and a baby singing really loudly in the back, sloooooowly creeping through the hood staring out trying to work out in my head how I could keep utility bills low enough to afford the $600 in rent they're probably asking for a two bedroom house with a backyard and car port. Like I said, not the bests neighborhoods.
While other downsides include never really being able to have friends over and having zero phone conversational privacy, except when you go sit in your car like a sixteen year old talking on the phone to the boy they have a crush on; the conveniences of free rent are manifold.
Below are some TIPS ON LIVING IN POVERTY that I would be pressed to implement to a greater degree had I not sold my autonomy in exchange for a free place to poop in private.
3a: Eat a meal from free samples at the grocery store. Whole Foods, Sam's Club, United Supermarkets, HEB, and probably variations of your local grocer will give samples out on at least one day a week. Make the rounds to all the sample tables when you first come in, fill up your cart, and make another round. bingo. free meal.
3b: Sign up for all the free government shit you qualify for, then DON'T FUCKING TELL ANYONE. Apparently it's like, uncool to receive government aid. (Unless you're over sixty-five (then you're entitled) or disabled.) Uncool means a lot of things, especially in Texas, and one of the things it means is UnAmerican. It's apparently UnAmerican to utilize the social programs we have been paying taxes for since getting a job at sixteen or whenever. Apparently, we should say we support them when we're asked about them at parties or social gatherings, then go real quiet and create an awkward silence that indicates our discomfort with a situation in which someone we know actually USES them (if we're "liberal"). If we're conservative, we should just bitch about how millions people are living comfortably off welfare for free and are doing diddly to contribute to a better America while we, the hardworking and morally unblemished "middle class" pay to support their crack habits. We say this while simultaneously drinking a bottle of $250 scotch and preaching about the charity of Christ.
3c: Become best friends with the Schwann man. Or the PeaPod delivery guy. Or whoever in your area goes around the neighborhood in a big truck delivering food. And by "best friends," I totally mean wear short shorts and a low cut shirt while jogging out to his truck where he's making a delivery to a neighbor, offering him a bottle of water when it's 100 degrees outside. Either he will start to slip you frozen meals on the sly, or he will become a creepy prowler around your house, stalking you. If there's no grocery delivery near you, you can always try a UPS man/woman. Never know what's in those packages that could be of value or use. Hey, worth a shot.
