Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Sorry, Santa: Tif's Not--So-Grown-Up (excluding that last item, there) Christmas List

Today I'm going to have a little fun. Today I'm going to do a childish, selfish thing and make a Christmas list of ultimately meaningless objects that I really, really want, just because I want to. Screw "My Grownup Christmas List" -- even as a rabid idealist, I know I'm wasting my Santa wishes on world peace. Never gonna happen. And I realized today that I never really remember making a Christmas list when I was a kid. I'm sure I did, but it was overshadowed by hell. And so, today, right here, right now, I am making a Christmas list of stuff I want for me, me, and myself.

1. The Sims 3 Supernatural and the Sims 3 Seasons.
2. A fresh supply of Sensual Amber body butter from Bath and Body Works.
3. Two more ear piercings.
4. A giant dollhouse that opens up, kind of like this one:
Looook at it ...
5. All those American Girl dolls I lusted after but never got when I was a kid.
Loooook at them ...
6. The complete boxed set(s) of Little House on the Prairie books and DVDs.

7. These dresses from the Pyramid Collection:
Oooooo ...
Aaaaahhh ...
8. This bedspread and shams, also from the Pyramid Collection:
Are you seeing this right now?!
9. A Tibetan singing bowl and clapper:
It makes pretty sounds.
and 

10. (I'll stop here or risk going on forever.) Mariska Hargitay at my door wearing a ponytail with a big Christmas bow in it (she's so cute with a ponytail) and aside from the ponytail and the bow, absolutely nothing else.

Ta-da! My list.

Holy jeebus, that was fun!

Sorry, Santa!






Thursday, November 8, 2012

A Poverty Story

I was born in December of 1984. In '85, my father drove an 18-wheeler all over the Midwest hauling coal and powdered gypsum for a trucking company called Buchta, and my mother worked at the local five n' dime. '86 was the same. In '87, we moved to Boyleston, IN and lived in a single-wide trailer next to the railroad tracks. Coal dust hung in the air. The smell from the hog farm across the way was unpleasant at best, and overpowering at worst. My father still drove for Buchta, leaving my mother home to care for me and my brother, who was born in July of '88. She had no job, no car, no friends: just two small children and my aunt and uncle, who lived within sight of our kitchen window.

I have Cerebral Palsy. Throughout my childhood I needed urgent and expensive medical care, usually in the form of surgery after surgery. By the time I was seven I'd had my eyes, the adductors and abductors in my hips, both calves, both hamstrings, and the quadriceps muscle in my right leg operated on. There were glasses and casts and braces, wheelchairs and walkers and rehab and therapy -- both physical and occupational -- to be afforded. I got my first pair of leg braces in 1988, when I was four years old, and like children that age will do, I grew out of them quickly and needed another pair -- and then another, and another, and another, and another ....

By 1990, my mother couldn't stand being in Boyleston anymore. With all her worldly possessions and both of her children packed into a rusted, boxy yellow car that resembled nothing so much as a banana, she moved back to my hometown of French Lick. She was 21 years old.

Off and on throughout my childhood, my mother pulled down what money she could working as a waitress at local restaurants. My father still drove for Buchta, though he cut back on overnights and eventually phased them out entirely by performing local runs -- the same route, day in and day out, day after day -- and picking up a second job as a mechanic at a place called Benny's Garage. He spent every weekday in his truck, and as many nights per week and weekends -- including Sundays -- as he could get, under a truck at Benny's.

By that time, my father had a definite problem with alcohol and my mother was suffering from depression. I was more than she had signed on for. When you have a baby at 16, you think of it, I think, more as a doll than a person: it'll be cute, and fun to dress up and parade around. But I was no doll, and definitely not an easy baby: I screamed and squalled from constant discomfort; I was undersized, wrongly formed, time-consuming and expensive. 

The more I think about it now, the easier it is for me to see how I came to have the past I have. My mother has always been exceptionally intelligent -- in fact, her IQ registers in the genius range. And she was active: in high school she played volleyball and ran track. She has albums full of awards for everything from History to French to Geometry. She told me once, when I was a teenager, that she'd always wanted to go to college at NYU in New York City just to see what such a big place was like. At 15, the world lay in front of my mother like candy for the taking. At 16, there was me. By the time she was 21, she had two kids and an alcoholic husband. She must have been absolutely miserable waiting tables and counting tips, changing diapers and watching the bills pile up and up and up. She was just a kid herself.

I don't think she's quite as miserable anymore; in fact, she may even be as happy as my mother can manage to be. She has a teaching degree and a career, girlfriends to hang out with and money to travel. And in a sad and all-too-familiar change of fortune, I have taken her place in the world of the poor.

I was 17 years old when I went to my mother with a pen and my FAFSA, needing her signature for that all-important financial aid. By then, the two of us were at mutual-enemy status. She resented me and would deny me what I wanted or needed simply for the pleasure of watching me suffer, and I, therefore, resented her and took my pleasure in finding ways to get what I wanted anyway, just to piss her off. So when she took one look at that FAFSA and told me outright that she didn't give a damn whether I went to school or not, that was it: I was going to school if I had to pull the planet out of orbit to do it. I was too smart not to, anyway: everybody said so, even if I didn't quite believe it.

I started at the University of Southern Indiana in the summer of 2003, barely 2 months after I graduated high school. I applied for and was granted what was called a "dependency override" or a "signature exemption," meaning I didn't need my parents' financial information or signatures to be eligible for federal aid. I was, money-wise and in every other notable respect, on my own.

I had some help: Occupational/Vocational Rehabilitation paid for my books and part of my tuition, and I got to keep my SSI. I was even attending psychotherapy on the Victims of Crime Assistance Grant, or VOCA. I presented myself to the financial aid office at the university and took out a loan to cover the rest -- and there is where my problems started.

I didn't know thing number one about loans or how to manage money. I couldn't tell you what a reasonable rate of interest was, or outline the merits of one provider over another. I went with Sallie Mae because the counselor told me it was the largest provider of student loans in the nation, which I mistakenly thought meant it was the best choice. When I started back to school in PA, I consolidated and switched over to American Education Services, but Sallie Mae took me for one hell of a ride for years. Also, like most kids, I overspent: I went from zero to financially independent literally overnight, and I just couldn't get over the idea that I could go to the store and buy stuff whenever I wanted. I could kick myself now. I could have saved so much money back then, but instead I spent it like there would always be more tomorrow.

I moved to PA in July of '05. In October of that year, I got my own apartment. It wasn't much to look at -- it was a rat hole, actually -- but I was proud of it: a huge living room, a kitchen and separate dining room, and 2 bedrooms for $325/month. Never mind that the porch was about to fall off or that the floor was so torn up it gave me wicked splinters through my socks -- it was my first apartment, and I thought it was a castle ... and then I had to pay to heat the castle.

OUCH.

At that point, everything started to go to Hell at once: I had to quit my job because my PTSD was so bad I ended up hospitalized multiple times; Social Security docked my check for several months because I hadn't been aware of the mandatory income reporting rule when I was working; the ancient furnace under my dilapidated porch burned through heating oil at a thousand gallons a minute ... before I knew what was happening, I was watching my own bills pile up and seeing my breath in my living room because I couldn't afford to keep the heat on. And then I had a bank balance of -$325.00, and the fuel bill ended up in collections, and plunk! In May of '06 I was in Housing.

And I'm still stuck here.

While I was busy getting my mental health back together, I came off my "palsy plateau" and my physical health began to fail. In 2008, I finally declared that I was going back to school and bit the bullet, even though I was often so ill I had to run out of classrooms to throw up and take exams while coping with off-the-charts pain levels. But I did it. I got a job working in the library for the better part of a year, too, and in May of this year, I walked across that stage and got my diploma ...

Which is now hanging uselessly on my wall. A $25,000 decoration in an apartment so small, I could spit from the front door and hit the back wall in the bedroom. 

I have stopped being excited when I send out a resume now. I just drop it in the mail and wait for the rejection letter: I've gotten so many, I could wallpaper my room with them. Last week, I signed up for a temp agency that will hire me out as a receptionist or secretary *if* they can find a place to put me, when what I really want to do is practice Social Work. I myself am experiencing some of the frustration my mother must have felt: I'm a bright, active mind stuck with the possibility of doing paperwork for a living because my bills have got to be paid. Disability complicates this: I can't just take any old job. I have to be able to physically do it, and it has to pay enough for my SSI to at least come out even after they rape my check to compensate for my wages. (I can't do blue-collar work full time because of the sheer physicality of it, so if I work for too little per hour, my check doesn't come out even and I'm actually working myself into more debt. And don't even get me started on the way the Housing Authority leaps on every extra cent I make like they'll die without it.) I'm also convinced that I lose job opportunities simply because of being disabled, though no one would dare let on that there's any truth to that. I find it less so in the white-collar environment, but subconscious thought on the part of employers seems to be that the employee in the wheelchair cannot perform as well as the employee without one. That's why there are EOE laws, though they don't seem to be helping me a whole hell of a lot right now.

And then there's the common boat of, well, the job market just sucks. I'm not the only one who can't find work, though I do fear that with that plus all the rest, I'll be out here floating in the poverty canoe for the rest of my life.

Sigh.

Can I beat up my mother and take her lunch money? If I were the right kind of person, I'd say she owes me some.